A view of the installation of Jordan Lord’s exhibition “The Voice of Democracy” in Squeaky Wheel’s gallery space. On the left is I Didn’t Set Out to Make a Film About Religion, a red projected image on a wall, with a red color field and the captions “‘We Heart New College”, people holding cameras, police officers”. On the far end of the room is a person looking at a dimly lit television screen wearing headphones, featuring An All-Around Feel Good. On the television are a tree and captions underneath.
The following essay by Amy Ching-Yan Lam was commissioned for the exhibition Jordan Lord | The Voice of Democracy which was on view at Squeaky Wheel November 10, 2023– March 8, 2024. Click here to learn more.
Today’s top headline on the Voice of America website reads, “Blinken renews push for Gaza cease-fire; Israeli attacks kill 28.” A large photo of a Palestinian family, walking beside a mound of beige sand and gravel, opens the article. (1) Their bodies are clustered in the right side of the frame; the left side shows the sand mound and some belongings strewn on the ground, a mattress with a blanket, a pot with a lid. The faces of the adults are shadowed: the father looks down at the ground before the camera, and the mother’s face is turned away. The father carries a child, their lower body wrapped in a big blanket, along with several bags. The child bears a serious look. There’s the legs of another child, in motion, their body obscured by the mother and her luggage. The caption says, “Palestinians carry their belongings as they flee a makeshift camp for displaced people in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip after Israeli tanks took position on a hill overlooking the area, Aug. 18, 2024.” The photo doesn’t show the tanks or any Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) soldiers, even though they are referenced in the caption. The overall effect is of the barren, disordered landscape overwhelming the family.
The only other photograph in the article is of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, wearing a navy-blue suit, mouth partly open, listening or responding to another white man in a navy-blue suit with his arm up pointing, and whose back is to the camera. Blinken’s body is oriented towards the direction that the man is pointing in, as if he’s about to head that way. He is flanked by two Secret Service agents who are looking, focussed, in opposite directions. The heads of Blinken and the man he’s talking to are centred, and only their upper bodies are framed. The sky is blown out behind them. The feeling conveyed is that events are in motion, everyone in the photo is acting in response to each other, and in control. The caption reads, “U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken looks on after his arrival in Tel Aviv.”
These two photographs, taken together, put forth the idea of Blinken arriving in Israel to save the Palestinian family. This crude lie can be disproven, of course, by any of the latest dollar sums of weapons sold by the U.S. to Israel. But these weapons do not appear in either of the photos. The invisible bond between Blinken and the unnamed Palestinian family is the IOF and its American weapons.
Voice of America (VOA) is a news outlet, originally radio-based, supervised by the United States Agency for Global Media, an agency of the U.S. Government. First established in 1942, VOA expanded significantly after the passage of the Smith-Mundt Act in 1948, which authorised the U.S. State Department to “dissemin[ate] abroad, of information about the United States, its people, and its policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, and other information media…,” funded through appropriations from Congress. (2)
As Congress argued, the Smith-Mundt Act and the development of outlets like Voice of America was meant to empower America in the propaganda war against communists:
“The present hostile propaganda campaigns directed against democracy, human welfare, freedom, truth, and the United States, spearheaded by the Government of the Soviet Union and the Communist Parties throughout the world, call for urgent, forthright, and dynamic measures to disseminate truth. The truth can constitute a satisfactory counter-defense against actions which can only be described as psychological warfare against us…” (3)
Through broadcasting, educational exchanges, speakers tours, and the establishment of libraries, the Act would lead to “a worldwide understanding of the real America,” which “will contribute definitely to the maintenance of permanent peace.” (4)
To promote “the real America,” a “permanent peace,” and the truth as “counter-defense,” the Act imposed a few conditions. The most striking is that media produced by the State Department was not meant to be broadcast domestically. The Voice of America website, up until 2013 (5), included the following disclaimer: “The Voice of America does not broadcast in the United States. Our programs are intended for overseas audiences, as is our website.” (6) The Voice of America could not be heard in America. Politicians were wary of the U.S. government producing propaganda with tax dollars for its own citizens. This resembled too much a communist state. (7) To spread propaganda overseas, however, was a different matter. The Voice of America was meant to be heard everywhere else.
The other condition in the Smith-Mundt Act concerned the political principles of its media outlets’ employees. Prior to the Act’s proposal, various politicians and media outlets had complained vociferously of the State Department’s foreign activities. Most notable were the attacks on a travelling exhibition of paintings titled Advancing American Art in 1946: the exhibition was criticised as a waste of taxpayers’ money, promoting the work of untalented leftist artists. (8) So the Smith-Mundt Act included a clause that required a “loyalty check” of all personnel: no individual could be employed under the Act without first being investigated by the FBI.
Congressman Karl Mundt, one of the co-sponsors of the bill, emphasised the importance of this loyalty condition. As quoted in a Time magazine article from 1947: “[Mundt] was not willing to cut [Voice of America’s] throat because of a ‘faulty lisp or a foreign accent.’ Said he: ‘Let us rather guide it to make certain it develops the sturdy American twang.’” (9)
***
Jordan Lord’s exhibition “The Voice of Democracy” is named after a national, high school audio essay competition with a $30,000 scholarship prize, organised by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), which Lord won when they were seventeen years old. In How Is It That You Frame Old Glory In Your Mouth? (2023), Lord’s in-progress, feature-length documentary that anchors the exhibition and tells the story of the Voice of Democracy contest, they were told that they were the first competitor from Mississippi in the history of the award that had a chance at winning the national prize, because they didn’t have a “Mississippi accent.” (10)
Unrelated to Voice of America, The Voice of Democracy scholarship contest began as a training program for aspiring radio journalists, hosted by the National Association for Radio Broadcasters. The Voice of America is an international propaganda enterprise; the Voice of Democracy a prize for teenagers. The two Voices, though, have very similar parameters. As Lord describes, the contest stated that the speech, meant to address the question of how to honour America’s veterans, had to be delivered in a “clear and credible manner,” and that the speaker couldn’t include any information about themselves including where they’re from, their race, or “national origin.” The Voice of Democracy, like the Voice of America in 1947 (11), implicitly bars any speakers with “faulty lisps” and “foreign accents”— and as in the comment about Lord’s (lack of) accent—maybe even those with overly regional “American twangs.”
How Is It That You Frame Old Glory In Your Mouth? begins with Lord’s voiceover describing the open captions that appear on a black screen:
The words currently appear in Lucida Grande, a sans-serif font often used in captions and subtitles in films. This is the default font in the editing program Premiere Pro. The default font and the voice of the narrator are perhaps mirrors of each other, though this is not at all a given. Each communicates as if they’re mere delivery systems for speech and not speech that comes from someone and somewhere. The same way some people get to be just people, other people get to be just the narrator.
What does it mean to be “just people,” and what does it mean to be “just the narrator”? Lord’s exhibition—comprising this film; two other short films, An All-Around Feel Good (2024) and I Didn’t Set Out to Make a Film About Religion (in-progress); and a documentary film participation agreement—investigates these questions of narrators and audiences in liberal dicta about truth, storytelling, and justice. What makes an authoritative voice? What makes a believable voice? What happens when stories are told only to convince? Do people still listen?
A seated person viewing How Is It That You Frame Old Glory In Your Mouth?, a video projected on a screen. On the screen is Jordan seated with their arms and legs crossed, and one eyebrow slightly raised. They are looking towards the camera. Next to them is a mirror showing Lord’s parents, Deborah and Albert, who are speaking to Jordan. Above the mirror is a television screen with video of Jordan’s parents as it’s been paused. There are captions in the middle of the screen: “I thought your essay was great, but it’s not…”
Lord’s winning entry in the Voice of Democracy competition told the story of their recognition of their father as a veteran, after visiting the (American-)Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. on a family trip. In the speech, they relay the drama of seeing their father encounter, with emotion, the name of a deceased friend at the Memorial. They conclude, somberly, “That day I met my father, the soldier.”
Throughout the film, Jordan’s father Albert is portrayed as deflecting other questions about his time in the military. Jordan’s sister, Ashley, relays a story about seeing their father give a presentation about his time in Vietnam at school, hearing all of the action-packed details for the first time, feeling like she was “watching a movie,” and then asking him about it afterwards and his response being something like, “I told you the story, I never want to talk about it again.” Jordan’s mother Deborah talks about trying to press him on details early on in their relationship and encountering silence, and worrying if it signified a deeper disturbance. Deborah’s anecdote takes a surprisingly funny turn, but can’t hide the fact that Albert’s silence about the specifics of his military experience remains almost uniformly unbroken throughout. It stands in counterpoint to Jordan’s winning speech.
The speech itself is presented in fragments throughout the film, in listening sessions with Jordan and their family members, or Jordan and his fellow competitors, now also adults. The title, How Is It That You Frame Old Glory In Your Mouth?, comes from Michael, a fellow competitor who has a theatre background, speaking about Jordan’s performance. Michael and Jordan listen back to each other’s audio essays and critique each others’ delivery, pointing out parts that seem insincere or forced, or parts that actually feel real. Michael says, “What is the story that you’re adding to it with your voice? Do you believe it yourself? … It’s one thing to say, we have ‘Old Glory going in the wind’—but how is it that you frame Old Glory in your mouth when you say that phrase?” He concludes, “It’s not at all about the words that you chose, but everything about how you said them.”
This idea, of whether or not the high schoolers actually believed in what they wrote and performed for the Voice of Democracy contest, recurs throughout the film. Part of this is due to their age—what can high schoolers truly understand of war, or of veterans’ experiences—and part of it due to the content, regardless of age. How can one, even if adult, be creative or novel in expressing American patriotism in the century of American empire? As Jordan’s sister Ashley summarises, it’s “something that doesn’t necessarily exist, but that has the greatest PR marketing campaign of anything that has ever existed.” What does a teenager have to contribute to this marketing campaign of priceless value, made by the blood and tears of billions of people, that has, like the Voice of America and the Smith-Mundt Act, already tried every possible output and mode of delivery? As Michael argues, it comes down to whether the words sound like they’re being spoken by someone who believes. Put another way: successfully enacted patriotism depends on whether the words sound like they’re true.
Other former competitors whom Jordan speaks to in the film have similarly complex responses to their participation and the contest itself. I found these segments of people re-encountering their high school selves bittersweet—proof of how change is essential, and worth revisiting. In a testament to Lord’s generous filmmaking practice, Aaron, one of the contestants, says, “These are questions I’ve wanted people to ask me for a long time, so I’m excited to answer them.” Aaron reads from the teenage diary entries he wrote while participating in the contest: “I’m looking forward to spreading the gospel message.” Asked to further elaborate on that part by Jordan, Aaron says, “I read that now, and I tend to see more of my dad speaking than me speaking.” He later says that he was raised to be “a culture warrior… to bring America back to Christ.” It remains unspoken in the film, but it’s clear at some point Aaron turned away from that.
The image of your father speaking through you—despite, or because of, his own silence—perfectly illustrates the functioning of ideology. The pain and tenderness requisite in attempting to transform that speech is expressed in Jordan’s description of a close-up photograph that their mother took of a hug between them and their father, after they won the contest: “My mom takes the photo almost as if she’s inside the hug, but also outside it.”
A still from How Is It That You Frame Old Glory In Your Mouth?. Jordan and their father Albert are hugging in a photograph from the mid-2000s, taken by their mother Deborah. Albert’s face mostly fills the frame, as they hug in profile to the camera. He looks ahead with his mouth open, as he tells Jordan something. It might be a smile or he might be tearing up. It’s hard to tell because of his glasses. A caption on the bottom of the still says “It also does not name who and what sacrificed them.”
***
“The Voice of Democracy” exhibition at Squeaky Wheel unfolded in parts, as Jordan was completing work while the exhibition was ongoing. In their introduction to the exhibition, they write, “The show isn’t done yet… I’m telling you this, less as an apology or an excuse, and more to think about how it changes the work you might find here.” The work was explicitly presented as in-progress, pointing to the working conditions of the artist (probably too busy) and the openness of the institution to adapting to those conditions. I saw the exhibition after all of the films had been added, but knowing this made me think of the immediacy of the work: it felt close, and also fleeting, like future versions would be different. In this, it resembled talking.
A cliché about talk is that it’s cheap, but another way to say this is that Lord’s films are value-conscious. They don’t hide from the audience the material conditions of art. They note in How Is It That You Frame Old Glory In Your Mouth? that it’s the first film that they ever got funding for. The short film An All-Around Feel Good seems to be comprised mostly of footage shot on a phone or consumer-grade camera, and I Didn’t Set Out to Make a Film About Religion consists only of solid colours and text. This approach lends the work a sense of lightness—there isn’t an overwrought form or attachment to production value; what’s prioritized is the speed at which ideas move and actions have consequences.
A still from the film An All-Around Feel Good. An image of the Colorado State Fair, taken from the bleachers on a bright sunny day. The camera is facing a holding pen, where there are horses and riders, numerous parked cars and a tractor, and several U.S. flags, and audience members both near the camera and across the arena. The image is surrounded by a black border on both sides and at the bottom. In the blank space at the bottom is a caption that reads: “Belonging to the nation-state is not premised on seeing or attending.”
In How Is It That You Frame Old Glory In Your Mouth?, Jordan speaks to their mom about how the scholarship money that they won from the Voice of Democracy contest couldn’t be used for their undergraduate tuition at Columbia University, and which their parents’ contributions towards led, indirectly or not, to their parents’ bankruptcy. (12) This frank address of class is unfurled more expansively across the two short essay films in the exhibition. An All-Around Feel Good ties together the eugenicist precepts of capitalism with the liberal conception of a participatory, democratic audience. The film begins with Lord on an airplane, describing the “semi-communal” experience of watching the on-flight entertainment. Within this setting, of multiple viewers with individual screens, sometimes watching something together, sometimes not, Lord discusses the segregation of disabled audiences. Most films, unlike Lord’s, do not provide access like open captions for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing, or audio description for Blind and low-vision people. They say, “This segregation troubles the idea that there’s such a thing as an audience, who shares a common sense of what they’re shown.”
In contrast to the dark interior of the airplane, brightly lit footage shows soldiers performing training exercises in a park, crawling on their bellies, “practicing how not to be seen.” Lord describes how the Veterans of Foreign Wars, which organizes the Voice of Democracy competition, also runs a “Buddy Poppy” program that hires disabled vets and factory workers with developmental disabilities to make poppies, which are then sold to fund the VFW. Despite the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which became law under George H.W. Bush shortly before the first Gulf War, it remains legal to pay both disabled and freelance workers subminimum wages. Lord points out that the ADA is intended to provide disabled people equal access to employment by addressing discriminatory practices, but doesn’t deal with structural inequality. They quote from the Act:
The continuing existence of unfair and unnecessary discrimination and prejudice denies people with disabilities the opportunity to compete on an equal basis, and to pursue those opportunities for which our free society is justifiably famous, and costs the United States billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses resulting from dependency and nonproductivity.
The ideal American subject is brought into relief: independent, productive, competitive, and most importantly, not costing anyone else anything. The Act, in effect, cuts off the category of disabled from the category of poor, denying any connection between the two.
If one is poor, and requires government assistance, the price must be paid in story. In How Is It That You Frame Old Glory In Your Mouth?, Jordan says that “in the Veterans Disability Benefits system, vets must narrate their experiences in order to access their benefits.” The audience of these narratives is ostensibly the bureaucrat who has the power to accept or reject, who weighs the amount of individual duress against the benefits’ cost to the state. From Albert’s reluctance to speak about his military experiences, it’s clear how unfair this is for him and other vets who performed the work of the state, and of whom the state must surely have records. (13) In this chain of consequences, the state creates the situation that unleashes violence, and then asks those hurt by the violence to explain the situation.
***
Yet the violence inflicted upon American veterans is but a tiny drop compared to the violence inflicted upon non-Americans worldwide. As Lord states in An All-Around Feel Good, “Though the promises of the ADA fail to extend to many—if not most—disabled Americans, they promise nothing to those who are not American.” The American War in Vietnam disabled hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, Vietnamese. It continues to poison people throughout Southeast Asia via the residues of Agent Orange (14), and active landmines continue to kill and injure, especially in the central regions of Vietnam. Vastly surpassing the American dead, the death toll of Vietnamese people over the twenty years of war varies widely by source as it has not been fully accounted for. And the two decades-long destruction of familial, cultural, and communal bonds simply cannot be measured.
As with all other American wars, Western media focusses single-mindedly on the experiences of American vets, depicting their pain and suffering, and their ambivalence towards or rejection of war in general. The cause of the “foreign wars” are largely ignored: America’s intervention in Vietnam was a first and foremost war against communism and postcolonial self-determination, but the countless popular movies skim over the ideological content, relying on the trope that communists are vicious and inhumane, and avoiding the fact that, supported by the people, they won. (15)
Unlike liberal centrists, the far-right acknowledges and embraces the need for ideological conflict. The third film in the exhibition, I Didn’t Set Out to Make a Film About Religion, focusses on Christopher Rufo, a conservative operative who is famous for attacking “Critical Race Theory” and “Gender Ideology,” i.e. all non-white and all non-cis-het people. Most recently, Rufo was instrumental in dragging Claudine Gay of Harvard University through the mud for her supposed “support” of pro-Palestinian protests. (16) Lord’s film focusses on Rufo’s past experience as a self-described leftish documentary filmmaker (he claims to come from a long line of Italian communists), and his turn to the more lucrative career of far-right ideologue. Lord critiques the ideals of the documentary genre by tracing Rufo’s career path. “The liberal documentary as a tool for political conversion,” as Lord writes in their exhibition text, functions by appealing to people’s sense of morality. (17) This bloodless theory of effecting change is based on unearned assumptions about “humanity,” and is incapable of facing how liberal personhood is fundamentally formed through violent exclusion—by race, gender, ability, nationality, class, and other categories. (18)
Structured around Lord’s description of Rufo’s final documentary, America Lost (2019), before he became a full-time activist, I Didn’t Set Out to Make a Film About Religion consists of blank screens of various colours, voiceover narration, open captions, and snippets of music from the soundtrack to America Lost or canned applause. Lord pulls from newspaper articles and podcasts with Rufo, effectively chopping up and recontextualizing Rufo’s self-mythology. The snippets of sound are so short they almost seem like glitches; they create jarring transitions between the various sources Lord pulls from. This film is the only one in the exhibition that includes any music, and, counter to the usual application of music to smooth over transitions, it’s used to estrange.
Rufo describes his movement to the right as a kind of expulsion from the “far-left” documentary world, after he produced America Lost. But Lord outlines a trajectory driven, at least in part, by money: Rufo and his producer, Keith Ochwat, spoke openly of courting corporations to fund their documentaries, and bragged of how much money they make. At one point, they launched an online course called “Filmmaker MBA.” Now, Rufo leads “intensives” for other far-right thinkers: he claims to “teach the principles of successful activism: narrative, language, influence, power.” I found it striking that missing from his activist principles are any words related to community, other people, or relationships. This is, of course, a fascistic way of thinking about changing the world. But, in many ways, it doesn’t differ widely from the liberal model of “disseminating truth,” as described in the founding principles of Voice of America.
***
In the 2019 film The Viewing Booth, referenced by Lord’s exhibition text, the filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz records a Zionist university student, Maia, watching footage of violence inflicted on Palestinians under the Israeli apartheid regime. In one part, Maia watches a video of a Palestinian family being raided in the middle of night, provided by B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation. She argues with Alexandrowicz that the footage doesn’t show the whole story: “Film is only so real, you’re not really there. If I was standing in that room, and you were filming through my eye, I may have a very, very different look of this room, than what he’s choosing to show me right now.” Alexandrowicz asks her to explain, and she says, “I dunno, but I may be looking at everything! I would have observed different things, seen different things, and the whole mood is different.”
It’s a remarkable argument, that if you were in a room in which soldiers with machine guns were yelling and forcing small children out of bed before dawn, you would not be looking at the soldiers and the children, but at another part of the room. The fact that Maia argues that she would be instead, perhaps, looking at the ceiling, or at an artwork hanging on the wall, or “everything,” reveals the license she thinks she possesses to define reality.
Around the time of the Gulf War’s end in 1991, a year after the Americans with Disabilities Act, President George H.W. Bush declared, “The spectre of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.” (19) He was making the claim that America could successfully win a war in another country. That claim has clearly been disproven in the thirty years since. Resistance to America’s enabling of the current genocide in Gaza, and resistance to the attacks on Palestinians and any of their allies in Western societies, not only brings back the “spectre” of Vietnam, but pushes forward the life of Vietnam. Vietnam is not a war. The reality of Vietnam is not defined by America, just as the reality of Palestine is not defined by Israel and its allies. In bringing together all of these contexts, Lord’s exhibition looks for ways in which American reality isn’t self-defined—proving that reality isn’t simply articulated by those with more power.
***
A person wearing a hat and sitting on a couch, watching a television screen that is showing An All-Around Feel Good. He is wearing headphones. An arena is on the screen, along with the caption “This barrier quite literally marks national borders”.
In the back of my mind over the past few months since I visited “The Voice of Democracy” is the shadow of talking to my family about politics. I try to avoid it, so as to avoid disappointment, or worse. For example, my brother-in-law recently stated that “The West is not all bad,” and I haven’t yet asked what exactly he means by this, or if he heard it from a particular source.
Lord’s commitment to this work is exemplary: not only in the popular, pat sense of “talk to your parents about race,” but in its much more difficult meaning, as an investigation of what constitutes, and changes, a person’s political—meaning social—principles. “The Voice of Democracy” counters the common idea in capitalist democracy that politics is voluntary: “You can vote if you so choose! Please do your part!” But as Lord’s films relay, politics engenders, embeds, all of us, all of the time. To believe that one can participate in it when one has time—as a kind of voluntarism—is a negation of one’s power, which is to say, one’s responsibility. To take up this responsibility, though, first requires knowing exactly what it is that you, and the people around you, believe, and why.
Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. She is the author of Property Journal (2024); Baby Book (2023), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards in Poetry; and Looty Goes to Heaven (2022). From 2006 to 2020 she was part of the performance art duo Life of a Craphead. Their exhibition Entertaining Every Second (2018-19) looked at experiences and legacies of the American War in Vietnam. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, and was born in Hong Kong.
(1) VOA News, “Blinken renews push for Gaza cease-fire; Israeli attacks kill 28,” Voice of America. August 14, 2024, https://www.voanews.com/a/blinken-to-arrive-in-israel-as-us-pushes-for-gaza-cease-fire/7747038.html
(2) The Smith-Mundt Act is also known as the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act. U.S. Agency for Global Media, https://www.usagm.gov/who-we-are/oversight/legislation/smith-mundt/
(3) Edward L. Carter and Allen W. Palmer, “The Smith-Mundt Act’s Ban on Domestic Propaganda: An
Analysis of the Cold War Statute Limiting Access to Public Diplomacy.” Communication Law and
Policy 11, no. 1 (2006): 1-34, 8.
(4) Carter and Palmer, “The Smith-Mundt Act,” 9.
(5) The Act was amended under the Obama administration; since 2013, the Voice of America can be heard in America. This amendment incited the right-wing theory that Obama was allowing for propaganda to be used on Americans. A meme reads: “Thanks to Obama, it is perfectly legal for the media to purposely lie to the American people. He quietly signed into law HR 4310 in 2012, allowing propaganda to be used on the citizens of the USA by its own government, essentially repealing the Smith-Mundt act of 1948, banning the use of domestic propaganda.” “Check Your Fact,” https://checkyourfact.com/2020/10/29/fact-check-barack-obama-law-media-purposely-lie-american-people/
(6) Carter and Palmer, “The Smith-Mundt Act,” 14.
(7) Carter and Palmer, “The Smith-Mundt Act,” 11
(8) William Hauptman, “The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade,” Artforum, October 1973, https://www.artforum.com/features/the-suppression-of-art-in-the-mccarthy-decade-214149/
(9) “Foreign Relations: The American Twang,” Time, May 26, 1947. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,793708,00.html
(10) In I Didn’t Set Out to Make a Film About Religion, Lord says that although they grew up in the Southeastern United States, their accent comes from “emulating standardized American accents heard on TV.”
(11) Now, the Voice of America broadcasts in 47 languages other than English.
(12) Explored in Lord’s 2021 film Shared Resources.
(13) In a conversation I had with Lord in June 2024, they said that their ongoing work on the documentary may expand on this.
(14) I learned about this from the documentary For Example, The Philippines, a nine-hour-long diptych comprised of Vapor Trail (Clark) (2010) and Wake (Subic) (2015), by John Gianvito.
(15) The Sympathizer, the 2023 HBO adaptation of Viet Thanh Nyugen’s book, ostensibly one of the first instances of American popular culture to be based in a Vietnamese perspective, relies on this trope.
(16) As detailed at the end of I Didn’t Set Out to Make a Film About Religion, Rufo was appointed in 2023 to the board of New College in Florida by Ron DeSantis, in a sweeping far-right overhaul of the small liberal arts college’s curriculum and mandate.
(17) Lord’s exhibition text. https://squeaky.org/event/jordan-lords-voice-of-democracy/
(18) Sylvia Wynter names one of these categories as being employed or not—the jobless person is also excluded from humanity. David Scott, “The Re-enchantment of Humanity: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter” Small Axe 8 (2000): 119-207.
(19) Heonik Kwon, Ghosts of War in Vietnam (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 12. Kwon refers to Christian G. Appy, “The Ghost of War,” The Chronicle Review 50 (2004), 12-13.
