Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 241

December 28, 2017: Reviewing Resistance: Twitter

[Whether we like it or not—and it likely goes without saying that I don’t—2017 has been defined by Donald Trump. So for this year in review series, I wanted to AmericanStudy five forms of resistance to all things Trump. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the year, Trumptastic or otherwise, in comments!]On three Twitter accounts that exemplify three forms of social media resistance.1)      Ted Lieu: The conversation about elected officials using (or abusing) Twitter has to start with the current occupant of the Oval Office, of course. But while Trump may have pioneered that consistent use of the social media platform (Obama Tweeted very sparingly from his official presidential account while in office), that doesn’t mean that all elected officials who Tweet regularly have to do so in such aggressively awful ways. And I would highlight California Congressman Ted Lieu as a model of a very different form of political Tweeting. Lieu certainly seems to revel in a form of social media celebrity that is not unlike what Trump enjoyed in the years before his presidential run, and that’s a complicated identity for any political leader to inhabit. But to my mind, Lieu uses his Tweets most consistently not to self-aggrandize, not to attack or demean, and not to gain attention for its own sake, but rather to attempt to shape and move the conversation in ways that will be both opposed to Trump’s narratives and productive for our civic community. Those are vital goals for any political Tweeting in 2018, to me.2)      April Reign: I’ve written a good bit about hashtag activism in this space, and April Reign, creator of #OscarsSoWhiteand co-creator of #NoConfederate(among other hashtag movements), is one of our most prominent such social media activists. In that role, I’d say she’s using Twitter for even more important and enduring—and more innovative—causes than resisting Trump. But at the same time, I would also argue that Reign—like the three young women who started the #BlackLivesMatter movement, like Shaun King and Deray McKesson and many other figures who have achieved their prominence and power online—is a leading voice in a 21stCentury, digital Civil Rights Movement. Such a movement itself represents a potent alternative and antidote to Trump and the white supremacism for which he so consistently stands (especially in his Tweets and online presence). Moreover, Reign’s Tweets and voice, while of course unique and individual to her, also represent one of our most important social and political communities (as we just witnessed in the Alabama special election for Senate), and a group that is at the forefront of the resistance: African American women. 3)      Stephen King: While both political engagement and hashtag activism are key elements to Twitter, I think it’s fair to say that one of the platform’s most enduring features remains the chance to hear from celebrities in a more direct way than offered by most other media. Over the last year, numerous such figures have used their accounts to offer pointed critiques of Trump: George Takei, J.K. Rowling, Ron Perlman, Alyssa Milano, and many many others. But I’ve been particularly interested to see how Stephen King, one of the best-selling and most beloved authors of the last few decades, has done so. To my mind (and I’ve been reading King since I fell in love with The Dark Tower series and The Bachman Books in early high school), King has never been an overtly political writer; indeed, I would say that he is primariliy interested in fears and flaws that plague us all, regardless of any particular affliations or allegiances. So to see how fully Trump has pushed King to overt online political engagement, and then to follow the thread of King’s blunt and powerful Tweets, makes plain just how much none of us can remain neutral or voiceless in this moment. The resistance is all of us, and King, like these other Twitter voices, is helping fight the good fight.Last review tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other 2017 stories you’d highlight?

December 27, 2017: Reviewing Resistance: Judges

[Whether we like it or not—and it likely goes without saying that I don’t—2017 has been defined by Donald Trump. So for this year in review series, I wanted to AmericanStudy five forms of resistance to all things Trump. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the year, Trumptastic or otherwise, in comments!]On one of the worst parts of Trump’s first year, and an ironic but crucial counterpoint.Although there are so many awful stories every day at the moment that it’s nearly impossible to decide which ones deserve particular attention and outrage, some of the most horrendous headlines in recent weeks have featured strikingly unqualified and/or stunningly inappropriate Trump nominees to judicial positions. Moreover, one of Trump’s few definite accomplishments in this first year has been the successful nomination of a new, already highly controversial Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch; and that appointment was made possible by an even more horrendous and unprecedented political action, the year-long stonewalling of Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland by the entire Congressional GOP. Gorsuch’s life tenure on the Supreme Court reflects just how much such federal justices can and likely will be Trump’s most enduring legacy (at least on the American political and legal landscape), and so to see such consistently unqualified and extreme figures nominated in such unprecedented and inappropriate ways to these vital positions has been one of this year’s most frustrating trends for all concerned AmericanStudiers.Yet at the same time, one of the most consistently inspiring forms of resistance to Trump’s policies and agenda has likewise involved federal judges. Time and again, such judges have ruled to stop and/or overturn Trump’s most extreme and controversial proposals; this has happened most consistently with the many different iterations of the Muslim immigration/travel ban, but has also been the case with Trump’s attempts to deny federal funding to so-called sanctuary cities and his proposal to allow corporations to exclude contraception coverage from their health insurance plans, among other instances. While of course Trump has frequently attempted to blame these judicial decisions on similar kinds of political and/or personal perspectives to those he attributed (with extreme racism) during his presidential campaign to a judge of Mexican ancestry, the truth is quite the opposite: these judges are working to uphold America’s Constitution and its status (sometimes idealized, to be sure, but nonetheless always present from the founding on) as a nation of laws, in the face of an administration that seems determined to ignore or even actively counter such legal and political histories. As I highlighted in this March post, however, some of the parallels between Trump and his favorite historical president, Andrew Jackson, remind us of how fragile such judicial decisions have at times been in our histories. Granted, there were far fewer means of raising awareness and protest when Jackson blatantly ignored the Marshall Court’s ruling on Indian Removal than there are today (when Trump bizarrely Tweeted “See you in court!” after a similarly challenging such ruling), and so the hope would be that any parallel presidential overstepping of the law today would be met with far more of a serious challenge than was Jackson’s refusal to abide by the court’s verdict. Yet the simple truth is that our political system is not necessarily built to withstand the machinations of a wannabe dictator hell-bent on circumventing the legal and political norms and precedents, and I would argue that Jackson and Trump have been two of the most (if not indeed the two most) dictatorial of our forty-five presidents to date. Hopefully the courts will continue to offer resistance to Trump in 2018—but I believe it’ll be equally important for us to support their efforts to do so.Next review tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other 2017 stories you’d highlight?

December 26, 2017: Reviewing Resistance: Late-night Comedy

[Whether we like it or not—and it likely goes without saying that I don’t—2017 has been defined by Donald Trump. So for this year in review series, I wanted to AmericanStudy five forms of resistance to all things Trump. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the year, Trumptastic or otherwise, in comments!]On three distinct and interesting ways late night hosts have challenged Trump.For anyone who has followed his television career, from its origins on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show through his tremendous success with The Colbert Report , it comes as no surprise that Stephen Colbert’s CBS Late Show has been one of the most consistent and pointed critics of Donald Trump’s first year as president. After all, The Colbert Report took apart 21stcentury right-wing extremism from within the belly of the beast, with Colbert’s bloviating and bombastic personanot only a pitch-perfect imitation of conservative media figures like Rush and O’Reilly but also a striking (if frustrating) prediction of Trump himself. While it might be somewhat surprising to see a network’s late-night show take such an aggressively political stance—these shows are competing for the biggest audience share they can find, and of course partisanship might lead many such potential viewers away from Colbert—that’s who Colbert has always been, and I’m quite sure CBS knew what it was getting when it hired Colbert to take over from David Letterman in 2015. Letterman hasn’t shied away from criticizing Trump either, but I can’t imagine he or anyone would fill that role better each night than Colbert has (although Seth Meyers of NBC’s late-late show has done pretty well too).At the exact opposite end of the spectrum (from both Colbert and Meyers) is NBC’s principal late-night host, Jimmy Fallon of The Tonight Show. Fallon has always been aggressively a-political, presenting his humor and now his show as entertainment that all perspectives can enjoy, and used that stance to defend controversial moments like his interview with Trump during the 2016 campaign. Even as recently as this past October, Fallon was likewise defending the dearth of Trump jokes or coverage on his show as “just not what I do.” That’s Fallon’s prerogative, and while I don’t necessarily agree with it, I do understand that entertainment doesn’t—and can’t—fit in any one box or category. And Fallon’s overall stance could be said to make individual moments such as his emotional and eloquent response to August’s white supremacist/Nazi rally in Charlottesville (and to Trump’s odious response to said rally) that much more meaningful. Which is to say, while political satire from Colbert might have become par for the course, such pointed commentaries from Fallon are far more surprising; and while we desperately need hosts to point out Trump et al’s follies and horrors nightly, those who do so only in particularly egregious moments can thus help highlight the special awfulness as well.Offering a third iteration of these late-night comic commentaries is ABC’s principal host, Jimmy Kimmel of Jimmy Kimmel Live! Kimmel is perhaps current late-night’s closest heir to Letterman in style, not nearly as politically engaged as Colbert but also far more sarcastic and dark than the mainstream, likeable Fallon (himself an heir to Jay Leno in many ways). That combination might make political commentary even more unlikely on Kimmel’s show (he prefers pranking both celebritiesand audience members alike), but earlier this year such commentary emerged from a particularly personal and powerful cause. Kimmel’s son was born with a rare and dangerous heart condition that has required multiple surgeries in his still very young life, and through those experiences Kimmel has become both an impassioned advocate for health care access and an equally passionate critic of Trump and the GOP’s health care proposals and agenda. Kimmel has been called “America’s conscience,” and I think the phrase is not hyperbolic—in these moments he is speaking not as a talk show host, not as a comedian, not as a public figure at all (although he’s certainly hoping to use his public platform, and rightfully so), but as an American parent, hoping for the best for his son and angry at how our government are seemingly so willing to ignore such concerns and voices. That’s a powerful form of resistance in its own right, as are all three of these hosts in their very different ways.Next review tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other 2017 stories you’d highlight?

December 25, 2017: Reviewing Resistance: Empathy

[Whether we like it or not—and it likely goes without saying that I don’t—2017 has been defined by Donald Trump. So for this year in review series, I wanted to AmericanStudy five forms of resistance to all things Trump. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the year, Trumptastic or otherwise, in comments!]I wanted to start the week’s series by highlighting one of the first public scholarly pieces I wrote after Trump’s inauguration, “Empathy as Resistance in Trump’s America.” As the year has unfolded, I would argue that it’s precisely a lack of empathy that has driven virtually all of the administration’s policies, including some of the most recent here in late 2017: odious immigration proposals such as the opposition to chain migration or plan to separate undocumented children from their parents; the extreme tax bill with its destruction of numerous social programs in order to transfer more money to the wealthy and big corporations; legal arguments that businesses can post “No service for gay customers” signs; and many more. I don’t anticipate Trump or his cohort suddenly developing a capacity for empathy, which makes it that much more important that the rest of his find and strengthen that capacity to continue resisting these policies and actions.Next review tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other 2017 stories you’d highlight?

December 23-24, 2017: An AmericanStudies Wish

May all of your and our 2018s be full of the best of our American past and community, and yet help us move toward a far more perfect union and future.Year in review series starts Monday,Ben

December 22, 2017: Longmire Lessons: Walt and Cady

[I know I wrote a week’s series of posts on Longmire a couple months back. But having now seen the show’s last season, I can say definitively that a central wish for the AmericanStudies Elves this year is for everyone to experience this wonderful American cultural work. So this week I’ll make a relatively spoiler-free case for doing so by sharing a handful of lessons we can learn from characters on whom I mostly didn’t focus in that prior series. Add your thoughts in comments, Longmire Posse and everyone else!][Also: serious Season 6 SPOILERS in these final three posts!]On a couple final takeaways from the wonderful story of the multi-generational Longmire family.Perhaps the most surprising twist in the Longmire series finale (ONE MORE TIME—SERIOUS FINALE SPOILERS IN THIS POST!) was its resolution of Cady Longmire’s character arc and her uncertainties about her professional and personal futures: running for Absaroka County Sheriff to succeed her retiring father Walt. I’m not entirely sure that Cady is right for the job of sheriff, not least because (as my Dad and fellow Longmire Posse member noted) the one time she had to shoot someone it left her significantly traumatized. Even if this narrative choice existed solely to allow her final scene in the series finale to be a wonderful echo and extension of the pilot’s closing scene, however, with a new Longmire posting her own “Longmire for Sheriff: Honesty and Integrity” signs, the moment would have been well worth it to this viewer. But I would also say that the possibility of Cady becoming a Sheriff Longmire 2.0 allows us to consider through a multi-generational lens one of the show’s most central and enduring questions: whether and how an old-school type, hero, and person like Walt Longmire can have a role in a 21st century world.The easy, and not necessarily inaccurate, answer would be to say that he can’t, exactly—at least not in a role like sheriff. It’s not just that Cady is of a different gender, although that does itself speak to the transition between the Western cowboy archetype and a different such figure and identity. She’s also different from him in a number of other ways that suggest modernizing transformations: far more versed in the nuances of contemporary law (as a former practicing lawyer), far more connected to the Cheyenne and Native American communities (as a former tribal lawyer and an adopted member of the tribe), and far more closely focused on issues like domestic violence that have become more prominent law enforcement priorities in recent years, among other distinctions. All of which is to say, Cady’s unhappiness with having to shoot someone might be a feature, rather than a bug, of her candidacy for sheriff, and a reflection of how such roles themselves should adapt to meet the needs of 21st century leadership and justice. Seen in that light, Walt’s final decision to retire and ride off into the sunset (or at least the beautiful Wyoming mountains) makes sense and provides a fitting coda to the story of a man perhaps born (as he said in Season 5) in the wrong era.Yet at the same time (OKAY, ONE MORE TIME AGAIN—HERE BE SERIOUS FINALE SPOILERS), the final final moment of that ride into the mountains was another surprising and wonderful twist: a cell phone rings and Walt Longmire, the man who swore he would never get such an infernal modern device, takes it out of his pocket, smiles happily, and answers it. We don’t know who’s calling, but my money is on either Cady or Vic, Walt’s longtime deputy and very new (if a longtime coming) significant other. Which is to say, while those are two women in law enforcement leadership roles (partly reinforcing the prior paragraph’s points), they’re also ones to whom Walt is intimately linked, and with whom he seems very likely to continue talking on this newfangled technological device he’s now apparently embraced. Walt has always been a character on the line between old and new, or at least between respect for tradition and the past and a need and desire to move forward into the future in meaningful and successful ways. That cell phone moment, like Walt’s defining and clearly ongoing relationships to two members of the next generation of Absaroka law enforcement, makes clear that whatever his job title or status, Walt Longmire will continue to move into the future, bringing with him much of the best of our past.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other texts you wish we’d all check out?

December 21, 2017: Longmire Lessons: Hector and Henry

[I know I wrote a week’s series of posts on Longmire a couple months back. But having now seen the show’s last season, I can say definitively that a central wish for the AmericanStudies Elves this year is for everyone to experience this wonderful American cultural work. So this week I’ll make a relatively spoiler-free case for doing so by sharing a handful of lessons we can learn from characters on whom I mostly didn’t focus in that prior series. Add your thoughts in comments, Longmire Posse and everyone else!][Also: serious Season 6 SPOILERS in these final three posts!]On an iconic but mythic Native American character, and how a flesh-and-blood human one took a different path.For the first few seasons of Longmire, one of the show’s most interesting and ambiguous characters was Hector (), a Native American former boxer turned vigilante who brought a rough but fair brand of justice to the Cheyenne reservation and its residents and community when the white legal system failed them (as it so often does). As such, Hector sometimes found himself on the wrong side of Walt Longmire’s Sheriff’s department; but Walt certainly did seem to understand and respect the need Hector filled and the role that he played, and they not infrequently ended up being complicated partners in Walt’s own evolving, tortured relationship to law and justice. Yet despite these multiple important and interesting contributions to the show’s plots, I would argue that Hector never quite became a character in his own right, at least not a three-dimensional human one (the character traits that we did learn all tended to connect to his specific role, such as his refusal to kill any of his victims). That is, Hector remained fully and purposefully a mythic figure, a legend, a folkloric avenger for whom the larger-than-life stories seemed to line up more or less directly with the reality. When Hector was murdered in season 3, his death left a void in both the show’s storylines and the Cheyenne community, and for at least the next season and a half (really more like two and a half seasons in total) it was Lou Diamond Phillips’ Henry Standing Bear, one of the show’s main protagonists, who stepped in to become “the new Hector.” On the one hand this made a great deal of character and narrative sense, not only because Henry and Hector had been friends (as much as anyone can be friends with a myth) and frequent allies, but also and especially because of Henry’s own clearly defined role as a protector of the Cheyenne community (as I discussed in that last hyperlinked post). But on the other hand, Henry is also one of the show’s most multi-dimensional and fully developed characters, with a voice and personality and identity and backstory (and wonderful catchphrase, and total inability to use contractions, and etc.) that make him as recognizably and deeply human as the best characters always are. So turning our Henry into a legendary vigilante was at best a fraught endeavor, and one that threatened to derail the broader character arc of one of the most interesting and compelling characters and performances I’ve seen on television.The showrunners seemed to recognize that potential effect as well, and eventually moved Henry away from his role as the new Hector. In the aftermath of that shift, and for much of the final season, Henry didn’t have much to do, other than serving as the continual sounding board and friend for Walt that he had always been. But by the season’s and show’s end Henry had found a new role, as an even more unexpected replacement for another character: this time for Jacob Nighthorse as the owner of the Four Arrows Casino on the Cheyenne reservation. Henry’s general aversion to the casino, and his friendship with Walt who was thoroughly opposed to it, made this a surprising development (although his time owning a bar made it perhaps a more logical transition). But at the same time, whatever we might feel as individuals about casinos, there’s no doubt that they have become of central importance to the survival and success of Native American tribes and communities, a fact that both Jacob and the show itself seemed to recognize. By taking over the casino operations, then, Henry could be said to be fulfilling his role as a Standing Bear for the tribe in a more 21st century and future-oriented way than the legendary Hector ever could; and in his final scene in the finale he looked proud to be standing tall on that casino and communal floor. Last lesson tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other texts you wish we’d all check out?

December 20, 2017: Longmire Lessons: Cowboy Bill

[I know I wrote a week’s series of posts on Longmire a couple months back. But having now seen the show’s last season, I can say definitively that a central wish for the AmericanStudies Elves this year is for everyone to experience this wonderful American cultural work. So this week I’ll make a relatively spoiler-free case for doing so by sharing a handful of lessons we can learn from characters on whom I mostly didn’t focus in that prior series. Add your thoughts in comments, Longmire Posse and everyone else!][Addendum to the above: serious Season 6 SPOILERS in these final three posts!]On a mysterious character who embodied first Western myths and then American realities.One of the new villains introduced in the last two seasons of Longmire was Eddie Harp, a murderous, psychopathic thug in the employ of the Boston Irish mob. Played to perfection by , Harp became a lot more than that stereotypical character description, or even than that of a charming psychopath (itself a pretty common stereotype in recent pop culture). The son of a lifelong aficionado of the Western genre, Harp was perhaps even more obsessed with the genre than his father, and spent a good bit of his screentime and dialogue offering meta-textual commentary on the show’s various uses and revisions of Western tropes. As a result, while his character significantly contributed to the final two seasons’ plotlines, Harp added even more to the show’s overall engagement with the genre of the Western, and in particular with the kinds of iconic myths and images that constitute that longstanding American cultural form.Longmire likewise introduced its own version of another such mythic figure in the final two seasons: Cowboy Bill, a legendary and seemingly likable bank robber/outlaw weaving his chaotic way across the West. Such outlaws have been a Western staple since at least the Gilded Age stories and myths of Jesse and Frank James and Billy the Kid and the like, and as was often the case with those stories (historical facts and details be damned), Cowboy Bill is famously polite and charming, frequently even leaving his victims offering praise for the man who had robbed them. Yet as it did so frequently, Longmirealso added layers and revisions to the longstanding Western myth, such as the central detail that Cowboy Bill did not use (or at least did not show) a gun while performing his acts of outlaw banditry. Indeed, a key plot thread in the first episode of Season 6 centered on the misuse of guns by those seeking to thwart a Cowboy Bill robbery, a strikingly new iteration of the stories of armed and dangerous outlaws (charming or otherwise) so prominent in Western and Wild West mythologies.Yet it was toward the end of Season 6 that Longmiretruly complicated, and indeed entirely undermined, any and all mythic qualities to Cowboy Bill. It did so by revealing Bill to be none other than Bob Barnes (), a lifelong friend of Walt’s who has since the show’s pilot episode also embodied a kind of self-aware irresponsibility and blockheadedness. At times Bob has been a harmless buffoon, but ever since the Season 2 storyline in which Bob and his son Billy were revealed to be the drivers behind a drunken hit and run accident that gravely injured Cady Longmire, there’s been a dark side to the character as well. In the final seasons, that dark side was amplified by Billy’s descent into drug addiction, one Bob blames on his own reckless and irresponsible parenting and actions. And Bob’s criminal performance as Cowboy Bill was a direct result of those histories, as he could no longer pay for Billy’s rehab stint and resorted to bank robbery as his last-ditch effort to do right by the son he had helped push toward such a tragic 21stcentury situation. I don’t think too many Wild West outlaws had drug-addicted sons for whom they felt responsible and in service of whom they were desperately committing their robberies, and that reveal both changed the meaning of Cowboy Bill and exemplifies Longmire’s commitment to presenting 21st century revisions of Western myths.Next lesson tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other texts you wish we’d all check out?

December 19, 2017: Longmire Lessons: Malachi and Matthias

[I know I wrote a week’s series of posts on Longmire a couple months back. But having now seen the show’s last season, I can say definitively that a central wish for the AmericanStudies Elves this year is for everyone to experience this wonderful American cultural work. So this week I’ll make a relatively spoiler-free case for doing so by sharing a handful of lessons we can learn from characters on whom I mostly didn’t focus in that prior series. Add your thoughts in comments, Longmire Posse and everyone else!]On a character who generally reinforced cultural stereotypes, and one who wonderfully revised them.Since at least Magua in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), and likely well before, treacherous Native American chiefs/leaders have served as a central villainous character type for American cultural texts (especially within the subgenre of the Western, of course). Even a revisionist Western film like Dances with Wolves (1990) utilizes such a villainous Native American character, the bloodthirsty leader of the hostile Pawnee tribe, for key conflicts and plot developments. While of course lots of cultural texts and genres rely on villains to help frame their protagonists and advance their stories, and while it’s important to note that both Cooper’s novel and the film also feature heroic Native American characters (and villainous European American ones), there’s no question that this stereotypical villainous Native American character is a particularly complicated one. That is, as I wrote in this post on Longmire’s Jacob Nighthorse, it’s difficult for those of us with any knowledge of Native American and American history not to sympathize with such Native American perspectives, antagonist to European American heroes and communities as they might be.While Nighthorse evolved significantly as a character in Longmire’s final seasons, the show did feature precisely such a consistently villainous Native American character, in the disgraced former police chief and thoroughgoing bad guy Malachi Strand. Despite being played by one of the most talented and charismatic contemporary actors, Graham Greene, Malachi was never (for this viewer at least) the slightest bit sympathetic, nor (again, to my mind) did the longstanding and ongoing histories of Native American oppression or discrimination offer any complicating contexts for this genuinely evil character. Indeed, the targets of Malachi’s villainy were most often his fellow Cheyenne, amplifying the effects of his evil deeds and plans that much more. As I wrote in my original post on Longmire, the show found ways to work very successfully within the genres of mysteries and Westerns at the same time that it offered cultural and historical stories, and for the former purpose it’s pretty important to have a great villain or two (a “black hat,” to use conventional Western terminology) against whom our protagonists must fight. But we can’t ignore the cultural side to a villain like Malachi, and on that note he generally reinforced American storytelling stereotypes.In the show’s early seasons, it seemed that Malachi’s former deputy and his replacement as the Cheyenne police chief, Matthias(played by the great ), would serve as such a villainous character as well (he punches Walt in the show’s pilot episode, to cite one prominent piece of evidence). From the outset Matthias also had a different side (in that same pilot he works with Walt to solve the mystery and return a Native American teenager to her mother), but he still seemed like a potential villain for some time thereafter (at least in individual episodes such as one involving the drug trade). Yet that thread disappeared relatively quickly, and by the last few seasons, while Matthias has not always worked happily with the show’s protagonists, he’s become a clear and impressive leader of and spokeperson for the Cheyenne community. Indeed, even his occasional opposition to characters like Walt and Henry has consistently been driven by a desire to do the best job he can in those leadership roles, a perspective that differentiates him from any other character (even fellow Cheyenne leader-types like Jacob and Henry also tend to have more personal needs and goals) and makes him a unique and vital Native American character in American pop culture, one who challenges and revises longstanding stereotypes in favor of something new and inspiring.Next lesson tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other texts you wish we’d all check out?

December 18, 2017: Longmire Lessons: Gab and Mandy

[I know I wrote a week’s series of posts on Longmire a couple months back. But having now seen the show’s last season, I can say definitively that a central wish for the AmericanStudies Elves this year is for everyone to experience this wonderful American cultural work. So this week I’ll make a relatively spoiler-free case for doing so by sharing a handful of lessons we can learn from characters on whom I mostly didn’t focus in that prior series. Add your thoughts in comments, Longmire Posse and everyone else!]On the similar tones yet distinct lessons offered by two young Native American characters.One of (I hope) the only downsides to my daily posting schedule on this blog is that sometimes individual posts can get a bit lost in the shuffle, or at least are of course immediately supplanted by the next post. The schedule remains a key part of my goals, so I’m not planning to change it, but it does mean I should probably find ways to highlight or even re-up certain posts that feel particularly important to me. One such post was this one from 2016’s series on 21stCentury Patriots, in which I wrote about the talented and inspiring young Oglala Lakota pageant winner and activist Santana Jayde Young Man Afraid of His Horses. For one thing, Santana is just a genuinely impressive young person, the kind of individual and voice that we should all know about and celebrate. And for another, her efforts to combat issues such as depression and suicide among young people on Native American reservations perform two vital roles: asking us as a society to confront such issues and communities much more fully than we currently do; and offering an inspiring model for how young Native Americans themselves are responding to those challenges.As you might expect from one of our very best pop cultural representations of Native American communities and stories, Longmire likewise presented such young Native American identities, in a couple particularly striking (and striking distinct) ways. On the one hand is Gabriella “Gab” Langton (the wonderful ), whose harrowing story of rape and its aftermaths provided a key plot thread for much of Season 4. I’m trying to stay relatively spoiler-free in this series, to encourage anyone who hasn’t watched Longmire yet to do so, so will simply say here that while Gab is one of the show’s strongest and most resilient characters, her story nonetheless ends with what I would call survival and escape rather than true triumph over her adversaries and tragedies. That’s entirely understandable, if not indeed the best-case scenario for a character in her situation (and certainly one that contrasts with an even more tragic young Native American character’s story early in Season 5). And to be clear, I’m not in any way critiquing this emphasis on realism over romance (to put it in literary critical terms), as Gab and her story can (among many other meaningful effects) help draw attention to the kinds of systemic violence facing 21st century Native American women. The first appearances on the show for Mandy (played just as compellingly by ) focused on many of those same issues: initially a frenemy of Gab’s who was subsequently subjected to her own violent attack, Mandy then re-emerged in the next season as the friend to another young Native American woman (’s Tina) being abused by her husband. Yet as part of that latter plotline, Mandy began working as an assistant of sorts for Cady Longmire’s Reservation law practice; that relationship has had deeply meaningful effects for Cady (culminating in her adoption into the Cheyenne tribe), but has at the same time allowed Mandy’s character to develop and evolve significantly despite relatively limited screentime. She remains understandably somewhat sarcastic and cynical in her perspective on many issues facing the Cheyenne (and on the possibility of white characters like Cady improving them), yet at the same time has allowed her work with Cady to influence and shift that perspective, as well as (and most importantly) to suggest the possibility of a different and better future for herself. There’s no getting around the kinds of traumas and tragedies suffered by Gab, and we desperately need more collective awareness of them; but Mandy, like Santana, helps model how young Native American activists can move through them into vital 21st century voices and roles.Next lesson tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other texts you wish we’d all check out?