A little bit late, but the best I could do....

I think it is really interesting to look at and think about San Francisco as a mining city, considering I have never done that before. I guess it just never really crossed my mind, even though it is such a big part of our Western history – we are the golden state! Brechin has a lot of ads in this book, but the ones that really stuck out for me were the ones about mining (mostly though not entirely in the first section). My personal favorite is the robed California with a mining candle on her head literally cracking the earth in two for her gold, while mining equipment circles her like some sort of holy trinity (28). The breaking of the world seems to be a popular image in all of the depictions of mining, with the potential wealth gain of the act far outweighing the potential environmental destruction, or so it seems. In the modern world I don't think ads like that would survive for very long without a more uplifting message, but then again we're a little bit more enlightened now in the ways of preserving our ecology. I think as much as the media shapes popular thought, so too does popular thought have to shape the media. If advertisements about the glories of destroying our planet through mining and kicking Japanese people out of the country came back in style, for instance, I do not think mining or racism against Japanese Americans would increase... in our modern economic crisis though, I wouldn't be surprised if someone jumped on a gold mine and the advertisements for mining did start again... but that might only come to be if our earth wishes there to be more gold... not just the miners.