An Author's Sprawling Talk Touches on Rape, Revolution, Hate Crimes, and Angelina Jolie
By Lindsay Norcott
Staff Writer

Although members of the audience came and went, Derrick Jensen managed to entertain fifty to a hundred people at any one time during his three hour, rambling yet poignant talk Tuesday night in Rose Hills Theatre. Jensen, author of The Culture of Make Believe, spoke on topics such as environmentalism, education, and hate crimes.

"I considered myself a pretty progressive thinker before, but (Jensen) totally changed my perspective," Clint Russell '03 reflected in his introduction for Jensen. Russell was the main motivator in bringing Jensen to campus after reading The Culture of Make Believe.

To write this particular book, in which Jensen elaborates upon the countless atrocities that plague our time and place, he began with a question about hate. He was having some difficulty defining a hate group. If groups like the KKK could claim to love whites, then….

Jensen stopped, pulled his water bottle out of his backpack and declared, "There will never be a revolution if people will pay for water in plastic bottles."

Next, he took out ragged, dog-eared copies of each of his books, which he would read from sporadically through the rest of the talk. Finally, under his full-disclosure policy, he admitted that his backpack was made in a sweatshop and he only paid $7 for it-but it was a great backpack.

Not returning to his discussion of the rhetoric of the KKK, Jensen instead turned to his work with prisoners, a recurrent source of anecdotes throughout the night. Why is there a scene in every prison movie about men being raped in the shower when there is actually a higher rate of women raped in the culture-at-large? Why, when you put "rape" into an Alta Vista search, do porn sites come up rather than help hotlines? Why don't hatewatch groups shut those sites down when a similar one of black men or white C.E.O.'s-bound and gagged-would be targeted in a second? These inconsistencies really seemed to confound Jensen; it made his own inconsistencies far more appealing.

The Angelina Jolie moment came next. A long pause, a shift in his chair, and then Jensen admitted that he was just thinking about Angelina Jolie. He worries about her sometimes.

And did you hear that Nicole Kidman doesn't wear underwear? It's really a shame about her and Tom…He used to like Tom, but this thing with Penelope right after the break up is just unacceptable. Jensen had everyone in the audience shifting in their chairs as well. It was quite a relief when he brought it all poignantly back:

"How do I know what's on these people's genitals, or what's not, but I don't know about the massacre of 2000 Seminoles on the land where I live?" Jensen asked.

The response was much simpler than the path he took to get there. Jensen concluded that things which threaten our worldview are excluded from our vision. The danger in this, he pointed out, is that unquestioned assumptions are the real authorities of any culture. We need to start seeing the things that threaten us, questioning them, and assuming our own authority to fix them.

There is a plan behind every civilization to ensure those unquestioned assumptions, Jensen said. It consists of four groups. The exploiters have a responsibility to act as human and normal as they can; they must make the injustice they perform transparent and rationalized. The exploited should be made to participate in their exploitation through the rhetoric of production -you want to work, or you are deemed lazy. The resisters must be killed spectacularly to make an example for the rest of the exploited. The fourth group is the extras, usually the indigenous people, who are useless to the exploiters.

Such a structure is necessary, asserts Jensen, because before any group can commit an atrocity, it must convince people that it benefits them. Discussing the Holocaust, Jensen pointed out that each step of the way the Nazis framed it as being in the Jews' best interest to cooperate. Making a contemporary analogy, Jensen equated economics to the modern-day gas chamber. His point was that "we will walk into whatever form the gas chambers take as long as we're allowed to believe they're bathrooms." Rather than learning from our mistakes, we have allowed them to take on a more subtle form.

"The dominant culture hates everything, even itself."

"The dominant culture has a death urge."

"The dominant culture is going to kill everything on the planet unless we stop it."

"We aren't going to make it to any great and glorious tomorrow."

This was a series of conclusions that Jensen came to at some point in his life and has seen others go through. It made him wonder why he didn't just quit. He doesn't have hope; he says he lost that when he had Crohn's disease in his twenties. It is love that keeps him going.

"When you love something," he said, "the results matter, but not to whether or not you make the effort."

Jensen had pointed out so many problems, problems that no one in the audience could deny once they were forced to look at the things that threatened them, that the people leaving might have left feeling hopeless. Jensen left the audience with something longer lasting than hope; he left everyone believing that there was something worth loving, worth fighting to save.