Are We Nuts?

This essay, inspired by Gregory Ulmer’s Internet Invention: from Literacy to Electracy, presents a widesite consultation on the super wicked emergent problems of climate change and fascism. While these are deadly serious problems, the method of consultation employed here is quite playful. Pun-related discourses linked to the word “nuts” relate to the author’s “popcycle” of discourses that formed his ideological map. The elements of this popcycle include falling off a bicycle, the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, a Kurt Russell Disney film, a Swedish children’s story, and George Morikami (a Japanese American farmer interned during World War II). The consultation focuses on water crises in the American West, particularly as they relate to the nut industry. The conclusion focuses on the figure of the shaman: a “half-nuts” figure who can help us navigate our way through crises.