Hey Y’all, Max here.
This post will focus mainly on the experience about half of PLP 11 just had in Arizona and Nevada. The project we worked on was ‘Fear Factor’ which focused on the Cold War in it’s entirety.
I say just about half of PLP 11 went because back in October the other half of PLP 11 went to New Mexico, to study the atomic bomb and the impacts it had/has on the world ( and whether it is the most significant event in the history of human existence, as Mr. Hughes claims ).
As with most, if not all projects there is the content and then there is the medium/way of learning. For Fear Factor we would be adopting the Zettelkasten organizational method. Sometimes I think PLP has found the absolute ceiling on management techniques and then they tell us we’re using this hundred-year old German thought-processing and linking system for a new project and I rethink everything. I will link all my Zettelkasten-ing in one link at the end of the post so you can see my work.
As well as using the Zettelkasten system we had plenty of other pre-trip media to take in. the first book was Hiroshima, by John Hersey. I liked Hiroshima for what it is known for; a ‘new journalism’ style blending real-life people and accounts with a fiction-novel style of writing. Hiroshima is a very captivating recollection of early post-war Japan, and I enjoyed it. The second book was Fallout, by Todd Strasser. I didn’t like this one nearly as much, likely due to the characters and the chapters that take place in the past. It painted an interesting hypothetical reality, but it was difficult to be invested in.
Hiroshima Zettelkasten <——— Zettelkasten-style notes from Hiroshima
The other media we viewed was the BBC film War Games and the Netflix documentary Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War.
War Games backstory is pretty interesting. It was made in 1966 to show what a hypothetical nuclear event would look like. It is dark, depressing, and surprisingly convincing; it follows individual accounts to emphasize the humanity in nuclear warfare.
Turning Point is a documentary series that is about as far away from War Games as possible. It is a really good documentary series that goes back to the Second World War, connects it with the manhattan project and the atomic bomb, then connects it to the present. Very well made.
This was one of those PLP projects where they let us make whatever product we wanted, as long as it accurately showed our understanding of the driving question: “How has fear been used as a political, defensive, and cultural tool to shape our society?” This project also had us make our own inquiry question as a means of becoming more specific with our topic. I struggled connecting my topic to the driving question but I think it went in this order:
- How did anti-war artists change the Cold War?
- How did fear of the Cold War affect the American public?
- How did representations of the Cold War effect how we see it nowadays?
I basically just went with the most recent one because on the trip I realized I would not be able to show my learning with the first two inquiry questions, but I’ll explain that later.
departure / Arizona
Wednesday left on April 18th, after school. We arrived in Tucson, Arizona not too much later ( we had two short flights ). My first impression of Arizona? Pretty hot and flat. And dry. I would find out during this trip just how much I take the sea for granted, in Arizona there is no sea in sight. There are mountains ( which are pretty amazing ) but it’s no Vancouver.
The schedule was meticulously laid out by our PLP teachers to get from one place to the next and have things going on back to back, so as not to have much free time. In retrospect this was definitely a good thing but during the trip it sometimes felt like cruel and unusual punishment.
Our stay in Arizona was 4 days long and personally I think that was the perfect amount of time to be there. Highlights of Arizona include the Titan Missile Museum, Asarco Mine ( shoutout Dave ), and the Pima Air and Space Museum, the latter of which might have been my personal favourite place we visited. I’m not really into planes and aircraft but I could appreciate the history and background to a lot of the exhibits in the museum and throughout the airfield. I also did a lot of my best project thinking there.
In between Arizona and Nevada there was a lot of driving and some one-night stops. I would complain about the car trips but I can’t because I was in Mr. Hughes van and the music was pretty good. It also gave me a chance to be around some people in PLP I wouldn’t normally spend so much time with. Yes, it is a little embarrassing to admit I’ve been with the same people for 4 years and still don’t really know them well. But it was a good chance to bond.
The trip from Tucson to Las Vegas was a road trip, but we made a couple of stops along the way. The first place we stayed after Tucson was Sedona, which featured Biosphere 2 in what seemed like the middle of nowhere ( then again all of Arizona is pretty much a huge flat open desert so… ). Tusayan was the town we stayed in simply because of it’s proximity to the Grand Canyon ( which was an amazing experience, definitely one of the most beautiful and scenic Places I’ve ever seen ). The last stop was Kingman, which I previously thought was the most racist town in America, but after being there my impression changed considerably. Though this project focused on the Cold War, I couldn’t help but feel there was a strong Americana theme going on. It’s all connected in some way. There was also Seligman, Arizona, which is basically a huge Route 66 gift shop ( and kind of a ghost town ).
Seeing these small-ish towns along the way made me think of their history and what I learned while I was there. Would I live there? I don’t think so. But this trip, among other things, forced me to look at history and undeniable relevance. Simply because I am not interested in a small town in the American Southwest does not mean it doesn’t exist. And if you ask me, it’s good to be able to recognize this disinterest and curb it early on because there will be things in life I don’t like yet will have to face.
Viva Las Vegas
The second leg of the trip was spent in Nevada, specifically Las Vegas. Interestingly enough, I didn’t find myself hating it as much as I though I would. Before leaving I was honestly reluctant about this part of the trip because I thought there wasn’t anything to take away from somewhere like Vegas. I had preconceived ideas of Vegas, probably from how Vegas is portrayed in film and other media; money-loving, selfish, a city to indulge yourself in pleasures, which did not appeal to me. However, I’m glad to say that Vegas was much more than that and I really enjoyed it. Despite having a reputation for vice, the city itself had more depth than I expected; some of my highlights include the Bellagio fountains, the National Atomic testing Museum, the Sphere, The Beatles cirque du soleil show, MeowWolf Omegamart, and of course The Underground Mansion.
I personally found the mansion to be the most interesting part of Vegas simply because of the scale of the house itself and the extent of it. It’s crazy how far someone can go to live underground ( not even entirely because of the threat of nuclear war, Jerry Henderson was a pretty interesting character ). If I was lazy and I wanted a quick answer to the driving question I would say this is a living example of the fear factor, but that’s not even completely true.
So what is the answer? “How has fear been used as a political, defensive, and cultural tool to shape our society?” When one talks of fear, there is no better period of time to talk about then the Cold War. Imagine being an ordinary person in America or Russia, or anywhere that is a potential target. You understand there is a conflict going on but there is no destruction to be seen, except on television in a faraway country. There are people saying the end is near, to build a shelter, but nothing has changed yet. You fear for yourself and your loved ones, but there is nothing to do but wait and see what happens.
Now imagine you are a top general in the Russian or American army. It is your decisions that will change the world, for better or for worse. You know the enemy is in the same boat as you are but there is nothing to be done. As long as the opposing political ideologies are at the current boiling point, any move could be seen as a threat, further pushing both sides towards these all-powerful weapons of mass destruction. There is nothing to do but wait and see what happens.
Now is it clear the paralyzing effect of fear, on a personal level and at the top of the chain? Fear is all powerful, more powerful than any weapons of mankind. Fear penetrates all defences and plants doubts in all but the strongest individuals. It is unfair, but those at the top and their actions change the way the ordinary person lives and how they think. The culture of the public changes the actions at the top. Why did Nixon pull out of Vietnam? It was the American people who made their voices heard, to stop a needless war abroad. What did they fear? Conscription, Death, Destruction. What did Nixon fear? The American Public’s opinion close to re-elections and tarnishing his presidential reputation; it is all connected. In the best of times fear hangs as a shadow, and in the worst of times it leads man to make drastic mistakes.
My experience on the trip can mostly be culminated in a video I made, which you can find below. I very much enjoyed this field study and it’s project, and this might be the best field study I’ve been on. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for my next post!