ThoughtLeaf (Krista Comer)

"One power of the keyword 'west' is its ability to conflate the geopolitical entity and physical topography currently referred to as 'the American West' with matters of identity, style, and cultural belonging. 'Western-ness' is highly mobile. If the term typically invokes conventional forms of masculinity, a good deal of its social force and moral credibility owes to a suppressed but sustained dialogue with that 'other' West: 'Western civilization.' Together these connotations map flexible investments in both masculine individualism, including 'wild western' bohemianism, and Western civilization's grandest claims. Since the late eighteenth century, Western forms of cultural belonging and style have been mobilized in the United States in defense of nation, home, white supremacy, and empire."

"President Bush's everyday western regionalisms - his retreat to Crawford Ranch, his invocation of the mythical line at the Alamo to separate cowards from heroes in the 'war on terror,' his posting of old-western 'wanted' lists after 9/11 - [have] renarrated 'western' to justify multiple U.S. wars in defense of the values of 'Western civilization.'"

- Krista Comer, "West," Keywords for American Cultural Studies, pp. 238-39, 242

ThoughtLeaf (Seth D. Michaels)

"The song, the reaction shots, and Seth MacFarlane's general attitude are all based on a commonplace and awful trope: that sex is a contest, and that men win and women lose when sex or nudity happens. It's an archaic, prudish, creepy concept that derives from twisted notions about female purity and women-as-property.

"MacFarlane thinks if he has seen a woman's breasts, he has won and she has lost, and he is now entitled to gloat about it... Even if your character is naked because she's being raped, it still amounts to a victory for Seth MacFarlane to have seen your breasts.

"MacFarlane presents the whole skit as something he shouldn't do, which makes it even worse, because he wants to get credit for the cleverness of his idea while also pretending it is beneath him. Which is completely candy-ass and cowardly.

"The sexuality-as-contest-between-men-and-women thing is bubbling underneath so much that is awful: rape culture, workplace harassment, slut-shaming, abuse-themed porn, pick-up artist culture, etc., etc. It sets aside women as a separate thing from a person, and makes them into an object that is 'ruined' by sex or nudity.

"In a culture with a healthy attitude about sex and sexuality, MacFarlane's song would have no sting at all, because nudity in film would be a completely different sort of animal... [T]here wouldn't be shame associated with having been naked on screen...

"We don't, yet, live in that culture."

- Seth D. Michaels, "The Awful Gender Politics of 'We Saw Your Boobs'" (2013)

ThoughtLeaf (Richard Slotkin)

"It is by now commonplace that our adherence to the 'myth of the frontier' - the conception of America as a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top - has blinded us to the consequences of the industrial and urban revolutions and to the need for social reform and a new concept of individual and communal welfare. Nor is it by a far-fetched association that the murderous violence that has characterized recent political life has been linked by poets and news commentators alike to the 'frontier psychology' of our recent past and our long heritage. The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience."

- Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973), p. 5

ThoughtLeaf (Toni Morrison)

"There is still much ill-gotten gain to reap from rationalizing power grabs and clutches with inferences of inferiority and the ranking of differences. ... And there is quite a lot of juice to be extracted from plummy reminiscences of 'individualism' and 'freedom' if the tree upon which such fruit hangs is a black population forced to serve as freedom's polar opposite: individualism is foregrounded (and believed in) when its background is stereotypified, enforced dependency. Freedom (to move, to earn, to learn, to be allied with a powerful center, to narrate the world) can be relished more deeply in a cheek-by-jowl existence with the bound and unfree, the economically oppressed, the marginalized, the silenced."

- Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), p. 64

ThoughtLeaf (Patricia Nelson Limerick)

"In Western America, neither loser nor winner wasted much time in wondering how the other party felt. Western property users developed a style of maneuvering that made them resemble drivers who plunge into intersections, uninterested in the presence or intentions of other drivers. Given the limits of the Western environment and especially of water, there have been only so many avenues to prosperity. Users of those avenues have always encountered each other at intersections; hydraulic mining got in the way of farmers; farmers got in the way of cattle ranchers; urban water users got in the way of irrigators; dam builders got in the way of recreational river rafters. Collisions have occurred, but for most of the nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth, traffic has been unevenly distributed, and sequentially jammed intersections - an effect urban dwellers know as gridlock - have not been much of a risk.

"In our own times, the calculation of risk changes. Mining, oil drilling, farming, recreation, tourism, fishing, hunting, lumbering, manufacturing, power generating, and real estate developing - all the Western routes to power and prosperity are heavily traveled. At their intersections, the tension builds. Regulatory devices - courts and executive agencies - have attempted to keep traffic flowing, while the habit of blaming the traffic cop for the traffic jam has provided another source of resentment directed at the federal government. The multitude of intersections where interests conflict are not guaranteed to produce compromise. Property and profit have been for decades, and remain today, very sensitive subjects."

*          *          *

"In Western America (and elsewhere), the dominance of the profit motive supported the notion that the pursuit of property and profit was rationality in action, and not emotion at all. In fact, the passion for profit was and is a passion like most others. It can make other concerns insignificant and inspire at once extraordinary courage and extraordinary cruelty. It was the passion at the core of the Western adventure."

- Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987), pp. 75-76, 77

ThoughtLeaf (William Cronon)

"By the end of the nineteenth century, Chicago was filled with temples of commerce that were also, less obviously, mausoleums of landscapes vanishing from the city's hinterland. The grain elevators and Board of Trade celebrated the new speculative furor of the futures markets while simultaneously commemorating the tallgrass prairies being plowed and fenced into oblivion. The acres of sweet-smelling lumber stacked along the South Branch of the Chicago River testified to the fencing of the prairie and the growth of the city itself, but were also graveyards for the white pine forests rapidly disappearing from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Chicago's refrigerator cars and packing plants betokened a revolution in the way its citizens killed and sold animals, but were also monuments to the slaughtered bison herds. Behind each urban structure were the ghost landscapes that had given it birth. In sinking roots into the western soil, the city was remaking the countryside after its own image."

- William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991), p. 263