‘National Historic Landmarks,’ the Department of Energy explains, ‘can be nationally significant districts, sites, buildings, structures, and/or objects that possess exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States.’ In a late-August news release (PDF) we read:
U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Acting Deputy Secretary Jeffrey F. Kupfer today announced the designation of DOE’s B Reactor as a National Historic Landmark and unveiled DOE’s plan for a new public access program to enable American citizens to visit B Reactor during the 2009 tourist season. The B Reactor at DOE’s Hanford Site in southeast Washington State was the world’s first industrial-scale nuclear reactor and produced plutonium for the atomic weapon that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan to end World War II (WWII).
As the New York Times pointed out yesterday, however, Hanford is but ‘one of five Manhattan Project facilities designated as historic landmarks, including the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico and the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tenn.’ Another site is the so-called Chicago Pile. The atomic infrastructure of mid-century American warfare is thus slowly being converted into a distributed landscape of historic monuments. Perhaps it’s dark tourism with a physics bent – the national memory of nuclear fission, a geography of Cold War nostalgia. They are places where the atom opened up – a series of small entryways into matter.”
Don’t even think about running an illegal bingo game in Richland County, South Carolina.
The Richland County, South Carolina Sheriff’s Department (that’s them above) just obtained an armored personnel carrier, complete with a belt-fed, .50-cal turreted machine gun. Sheriff Leon Lott has charmingly named the vehicle ‘The Peacemaker,’ and insists that using a caliber of ammunition that even the U.S. military is reluctant to use against human targets (it’s generally reserved for use against armored vehicles) will ’save lives.’
This commercial I recently saw on Comedy Central for Progene male enhancement supplement warns men who are ‘not 20 anymore’ that, without their product, they won’t be able to satisfy a woman.
Here’s a screenshot of a graph from the video which purports to show how men’s sexual performance declines with age:
Of course, we women ‘know it’s not your fault,’ ‘it’s natural.’
Obviously you could could use this for a discussion of the increasing scrutiny men’s bodies are put under (much as women’s long have). But it’s also a good example of the way sex is often discussed; the implication here is that the only way to satisfy a woman sexually is to be able to have sex like a 20-year-old man, and the emphasis is clearly on penile-vaginal intercourse as the main source of sexual pleasure (though it does come with the handy DVD about the female orgasm). I might also use it when I talk about the ways we construct biology and treat some ‘natural’ processes as inevitable and unalterable while attempting to change others.
[Image: By Stuart Isett for The New York Times].
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