Opposing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in the U.S. Congress: Ideological analysis of Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committee Hearings

The United States Senate voted to ratify the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia in 2010 by 74-26, all 26 voting against being Republicans. The change in the voting outcome compared to the 95-0 result in the 2003 SORT vote was dramatic. Using inductive frame analysis, this article analyzes committee hearings in the Senate Foreign Relations and the Armed Services committees in order to identify competing narratives defining individual senators’ positions on the ratification of the New START. Building on conceptual framework introduced by Walter Russel Mead (2002), it distinguishes four schools of thought: Jacksonian, Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, and Wilsonian. The argumentation used in the hearings is deconstructed in order to understand the increase in opposition to the traditionally bipartisan nuclear arms control regime. The results reveal a factionalism in the Republican Party. The argumentationin opposition to ratification traces back to the Jacksonian school, whereas argumentation supporting the ratification traces back to Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian and Wilsonian traditions. According to opposition, the Obama administration was pursuing its idealistic goal of a world-without-nuclear-weapons and its misguided Russia reset policy by any means necessary – most importantly by compromising with Russia on U.S. European-based missile defense.

“The world too much with us? Rot!”: William Carlos Williams and the Ethics of Literary Perception

This paper examines the poetics of perception and the accompanying moral commitments of William Carlos Williams’s poetry, paying attention in particular to the visual ethos of his work. If in his early years Williams conceptualized the poet’s function as “lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses.” One of the chief arguments here is that this emphasis be understood as an expansive and ethically implicating one, rather than in creatively circumscribing terms. “Such war, as the arts live and breathe by,” Williams asserts in 1944, “is continuous.” After establishing the ethical basis for Williams’s poetics, this paper assesses the perceptual politics of his work of the 1940s specifically, and in a number of literary and historical contexts, including: his revisionary engagement with William Wordsworth and the Romantic tradition; his infamous poetic “exultation” at the bombing of London in 1941 and his elegy for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and his politically complex and often incendiary poems of social observation in these years. As such, this article both reveals and interrogates the sometimes contradictory ethical engagements and creative procedures that define Williams’s work in a period of profound political crisis.

Sunil Yapa’s Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist: Protest, Fiction and the Ethics of Care

Sunil Yapa’s politically engaged first novel vindicates the massive pacific protests that occurred during five days in Seattle in November-December 1999. These protests were summoned against the World Trade Organization summit. The novel responds to the wish to inscribe in the history of fiction a crucial event which would inspire and inflect the later anti-globalization movement and protests, and which according to some has not yet received the attention it deserves by media or criticism. This article discusses Yapa’s work in the light of the Ethics of Care, and develops an exegesis, which, incorporating elements of Hardt and Negri’s ideas about the Multitude, understands the novel mainly as a reflection of the crucial preoccupation thathumans have for other human beings, and the innate wish to actively take care of the Other and improve his or her life conditions.

Entangled Histories of Assimilation: Dillon S. Myer and the Relocation of Japanese Americans and Native Americans (1942–1953)

Dillon S. Myer (1891–1982) has been framed as the lone villain in incarcerating and dispersing the Japanese Americans during WWII (as director of the War Relocation Authority) and terminating and relocating Native American tribes in the 1950s (as Commissioner of Indian Affairs). This view is almost solely based on the 1987 biography Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism by Richard Drinnon. Little more has been written about Myer and his views, and a comprehensive comparison of the programs is yet to be published. This article compares the aims of the assimilation and relocation policies, especially through Myer’s public speeches. They paint a picture of a bureaucrat who was committed to his job, who held strongly onto the ideals of Americanization and assimilation, and who saw “mainstream” white American culture as something for all to strive after, but who was hardly an utter racist.