Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony is an anglophone novel that aspires to heal the effects of conquest and colonization through a decolonial politics that accepts hybridity, recognizes the sensitive work involved in transitions, and embraces Indigenous knowledge. Even as Silko celebrates hybridization, transitions, and boundary-crossing, she recognizes that these processes have a dangerous side – specifically, the potentially world-destroying effects of the nuclear arms race. The novel shows that settler colonialism is one aspect of an unfolding pattern that denies limits and boundaries; with the invention of nuclear weapons, it threatens to destroy the world. Silko’s message echoes Vine Deloria, Jr.’s 1974 essay “Non-Violence in American Society,” commenting on the era’s social justice movements. Giving narrative form to Deloria’s message, in Ceremony the multiple strands of Silko’s political thought – the Native American Renaissance and decolonization, environmentalism, feminism, antiwar and anti-nuclear activism – are woven together in a story that is also a healing ceremony for readers. Ceremony aims to create a world where indigeneity emerges as the dominant force for a world at risk that is also a world in transition.

This chapter explores the relationship between political moderation and realism and shows that moderation properly understood and practiced is compatible with pragmatic partisanship. It shows that at the core of moderation lies a certain propensity to self-subversion (the term borrowed from A. O. Hirschman).

This chapter analyzes the dangers posed by the politics of warfare by drawing on concrete examples from contemporary politics. It focuses on the controversial “Flight 93” essay by Michael J. Anton and shows how the rhetoric of warfare politics informed its theses and recommendations. It warns that this type of destructive politics, fueled by an apocalyptic rhetoric and Manichaean view, has become all too common in American society, and suggests a few way to fight against it.

Federal tax policy offered dependency tax expenditures to taxpayers who helped support their aging parents. This chapter analyzes the 1966 Congressional hearing investigating the adequacy of these federal tax incentives. The hearings occurred during a period of tax reform focused on reducing the number of tax expenditures available through the tax code. The parent’s dependency was not presumed but had to be documented, often resulting in intrusive IRS audits and limited access to benefits. Drawing on letters sent to the committee, this chapter analyzes the voices of adult children and the parents they supported. Their correspondence underscores the hardship that parental support exacted on adult children and their priorities regarding tax benefits for supporting parents. These letters also show the limited options available to parents in need. Relatively minor changes resulted from the hearings, but they illuminate how ideas of dependency and family operated in tax benefits.

This chapter begins by considering Lorine Niedecker’s reception as a "rural surrealist" as a deliberately minoritizing gesture with a primitivist agenda. It then moves on to claim that Niedecker’s surrealism-inspired explorations of unconscious processes overlap significantly with her (auto-)ethnographic take on her own rural Wisconsin surroundings. The chapter positions Niedecker’s short, witty, object-oriented poems in her book New Goose (1946) as ironic embraces of the primitive, in which the appropriation of rural artifacts functions analogously with the appropriation of the poet herself as a rural artifact. Niedecker’s work is rooted in an antimodern epistemology that links it with the overlapping discourses of ethnography and surrealism, in which the rationalized logic of capitalist modernity is challenged through an embrace of its opposites, the premodern and the prerational. The chapter contends that the objects one encounters in Niedecker’s poems are produced through a “poetics of detachment” in which, following a surrealist theory of the object, they assume a fetishistic ability to conjure up repressed and residual libidinal economies that form the obverse of modernity.

Much of contemporary discourse surrounding family support obligations has long centered on parents’ financial contributions to their minor children. “Deadbeat Dads” who failed to meet parental support obligations, and whose children required public assistance, were central targets in the 1996 welfare reforms, the culmination of years of policies directed at non-supporting parents. Largely absent in these debates was the responsibility of other family members – adult children, grandparents, siblings, and grandchildren – to support family members in need. Known as responsible relative or filial responsibility laws, such requirements have a long history in American social policy dating to colonial America. In 2016, twenty-nine states still had laws requiring adult children to support needy parents, although enforcement of such obligations had waned a generation earlier.1

This chapter addresses Muriel Rukeyser’s Depression-era poetics in the context of documentary photography and claims that her poetics rejects the logic by which language became complicit with photography in rendering aestheticized and therefore consumable images of the modern world. Instead, Rukeyser’s poetics envisions a new, hybridized mode in which language, in this case that of the poem, exists in a critical tension with the photographic image. This chapter also argues that “extension,” a concept that relates Rukeyser’s work to commentaries by Lewis Mumford, Vannevar Bush, and Marshall McLuhan, among others, functions as a critical concept describing the process by which poetic language becomes a counterpoint to the public archive of images generated by emerging commercial media and a technocratic state. The final section examines the thematization of photography in “The Book of the Dead” to claim that Rukeyser’s epochal 1936 long poem, which documents a mining disaster in Depression-era West Virginia, scrutinizes the prerogatives of photographic seeing by rendering the photographic apparatus into a visible component of the industrialized rural landscape the poem surveys.

The conclusion brings the analysis of parent dependency policies to the present. Medicaid expressly prohibited the consideration of family resources, aside from a spouse, in eligibility determinations. State enforcement of responsible relative laws waned by the 1960s. One exception was in California in the early 1970s, when Governor Ronald Reagan pursued responsible relative enforcement for parents of both minor children and adult children in the support of aging parents. Reagan’s campaign to strengthen such laws was clear rejection of the rights discourse in public assistance. These debates persisted during Reagan’s presidential administration and in proposed changes to Medicaid in the 1990s by the nation’s governors. Rethinking our conceptualization of the growing elderly population not as a problem but as an invitation could foster efforts to reimagine how we support aged Americans and the families who provide for them.