‘So God Made a Farmer’: The US Agrarian Imaginary and the Lived Assemblages of Settlement and Empire

ABSTRACT

In support of the National FFA Organization (formerly, the Future Farmers of America), Ram Trucks declared 2013 the ‘Year of the Farmer.’ Their commemorative Super Bowl commercial featured radio broadcaster Paul Harvey’s iconic 1978 speech, ‘So God Made a Farmer.’ This essay interrogates Harvey’s speech and its aestheticization and reception during Super Bowl XLVII in order to trace how U.S. settler colonialism is embodied and recognized, particularly in relation to narratives of the ‘secularization’ of the United States and U.S. political life. It argues that the resolutely Christian visions of social life and selfhood, modes of ethics, and place-making within the nostalgic speech and commercial continue to order and naturalize the interface between heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and U.S. settler colonialism. It also argues that although such religiose forms of relationality are reproduced and amplified in the spectatorship of the Super Bowl, they are imbued with ostensibly secular national and imperial meaning, and thus obfuscated as such. This essay ultimately argues that such religiose invocations of proper relationality – as a node of racialization and the production of power – can shuttle between religious and secular contexts while continuing to encode and reproduce formations of U.S. settler colonialism and imperialism.     

First-Fit colorings of graphs with no cycles of a prescribed even length

The First-Fit (or Grundy) chromatic number of a graph G denoted by \(\chi _{{_\mathsf{FF}}}(G)\), is the maximum number of colors used by the First-Fit (greedy) coloring algorithm when applied to G. In this paper we first show that any graph G contains a bipartite subgraph of Grundy number \(\lfloor \chi _{{_\mathsf{FF}}}(G) /2 \rfloor +1\). Using this result we prove that for every \(t\ge 2\) there exists a real number \(c>0\) such that in every graph G on n vertices and without cycles of length 2t, any First-Fit coloring of G uses at most \(cn^{1/t}\) colors. It is noted that for \(t=2\) this bound is the best possible. A compactness conjecture is also proposed concerning the First-Fit chromatic number involving the even girth of graphs.     

On a hybrid data cloning method and its application in generalized linear mixed models

The data cloning method is a new computational tool for computing maximum likelihood estimates in complex statistical models such as mixed models. This method is synthesized with integrated nested Laplace approximation to compute maximum likelihood estimates efficiently via a fast implementation in generalized linear mixed models. Asymptotic behavior of the hybrid data cloning method is discussed. The performance of the proposed method is illustrated through a simulation study and real examples. It is shown that the proposed method performs well and rightly justifies the theory. Supplemental materials for this article are available online.