Born from a rather schizophrenic upbringing (his father is Mormon/LDS and his mother was Jewish), Matthew grew up in the southeastern panhandle of Washington state. He was raised along the Columbia River like a postmodern version of Moses, except for the fact that Moses didn't have a tremendous lantern jaw or a ridiculous mandible. The Tri-Cities, the area where he grew up in, was the nuclear site where plutonium was developed for the "Fat Man," which was to be later dropped on Nagasaki. In order to hide the nuclear site, a fake city was built from scratch to hide its appearance from Japanese intelligence. Safely hidden among empty prefab housing, the plutonium was manufactured with a war-fever intensity. In fact, one of the three cities still has a mascot named after this horrific event: on the back of the kids' varsity jackets a giant mushroom cloud can be seen. The school is affectionately known as the Richland "Bombers." The Richland Fucking Bombers. The Tri-Cities was the basis for Matt Groening's childhood upbringing and the basis for The Simpson's Springfield. Richland had the retirees living there, whereas directly east of that city was Pasco--a city that was primarily used as brown/black person holding cell--where anyone that wasn't white was asked to live. The urbane modern sophisticates and middle Americans lived in Matthew's city, Kennewick. He went through all of his K-12 years in this city living a lower middle class existence with Matthew's other three siblings (including a twin brother) and from there on he followed his twin brother to Bellingham, Washington. He went to escape his mother's violent bi-polar episodes and his father's sudden unemployment from the nuclear site, and later followed his brother there to attend school at Western Washington University (WWU)--famous for its hippy-dippy, pot-smoking anarchism. Matthew immediately found himself at home with the radical politics lining the treelines. In what is perhaps his most mythic achievement, he made the bold decision to take a seven month voyage to Western Europe by train and North Africa by boat after graduating from WWU with a B.A. in English. It was here that he found himself with others and this was where he found his sense of common humanity and the belief that all of us aspire to a kind of oneness: That there is no better goal than to end all nation states, borders, fences, gated communities, nation-states and jinoistic pandering and hapless fear-mongering. The tragedy of our bloodstreams is the continuous borders and barriers and systems of violence which rage in the world. Knowing this, feeling this, inspired by his trip overseas, Matthew decided to attend graduate school at the University of California-Riverside.  As of November of 2008, he recently finished his  Ph.D. dissertation on the film media and manipulations of the Persian Gulf War (1990-91), a cultural studies reworking of Chomsky politics.