Day 18 Issues in Modern America 19 March 2002

 

1. Names. A couple of tests to give back, and sample answers I forgot to give out last time. Collect historical surveys. Start Honky Thursday—a reminder that everybody should have the first part read, response or not. Ca. 75 pp. per class day—it reads pretty fast, I found.

 

No class a week from Tuesday, continue it the next time and finish the following Tuesday, also Do the Right Thing.  Here’s a thought: how many would watch DTRT  during class time and following next Tuesday? The room is empty. I’ll still show it another time, probably Sunday evening, for those who have another class afterwards.

 

2. About the next stage: the possible solutions/policy options section. Again, see the appendix for detailed instructions. These are due pretty soon—a week from Thursday—so you’ll need to get at them. NOTE: important thing here is to present a range of options fully and fairly, not taking a position on which is the best one. Again, this will require careful and balanced research if you’re to be fair.

 

3. Side note on sources, esp. web sources—NARTH and that Dresden site. The first runs counter to the prevailing ideas about homosexuality but is probably not nazi. The second, if you look around a little, is part of a national socialist site that makes apologies for Hitler, etc. Be aware.

 

http://www.narth.com/docs/1996papers/dickson.html 

http://internettrash.com/users/library/dresden.htm

 

4. Today I’d like to do some more reflection on War Memorials, and start to think ahead to what we might do in the last weeks of the course, when we have some “free” days built in.

 

So. What did Clint say that surprised you, or that you’d like to think more about? I was surprised by a few things, though I know him fairly well. Maybe I was most surprised by his idea that Nolan needs to “become a veteran,” and that he does that by throwing all those darts at poor Buddy and by looking back so that Steve Pitts will blow himself up. Buddy needs to be brought to justice for shooting Tump with an arrow, surely, but by throwing fifteen darts at him?

 

Another passage near there, 175-176, on the proposed war memorial for the gulf war and the two “local half-wits” who’d been in it, about the “imaginary monument” for all those who are victims of life, not of war.

 

Clint talked about raising questions, not providing easy answers, and I respect him for that. Here’s a question that I think we might continue to ask, emerging from this book: What does it take to make the passage to manhood in America? What are our rituals, our rites of passage, and how well are they working? Pause and jot down the events, the sign-posts, that you think of as marking the passage from boyhood to manhood (girlhood to womenhood too).

 

What are they? Getting a driver’s license? Finishing school, getting a degree, getting a job? Turning 21? Serving in the military, playing on a championship team, getting married, fathering a child?  What’s Nolan’s problem with all of these things? He’s shut out of them, for one reason or another.

 

5. About hierarchies: we talked about Celie, stuck at the bottom of a bunch of them. What about Nolan? He’s a white male, which gives him points in two areas. But otherwise? He’s not educated, not especially smart, his wife’s not faithful, he’s dependent on his father for money, he was never an athletic hero nor a war hero like Steve Pitts and his dad. In some ways, his fix is comparable to Celie’s—not as awful, surely, but no real picnic either. Like her, he wants love and work and friends.

 

Looking out beyond this book, isn’t this a pretty common problem for American males, especially those from working-class backgrounds who aren’t especially drawn to or successful at academic work? How do you establish yourself as a man? You get a good job and marry a desirable woman, right? But how do you get a good job if the factories have all moved to Mexico? How do you win a good woman if you don’t make money? Etc.

 

6. Let’s think about something else. How much is Nolan free to determine his own life and his own actions, and how much is he bound be what happens around him? What about the other characters?

 

The long argument about free will vs determinism, which is philosophical and literary but also quite actual. How much are any of our lives a product of our circumstances? Take a few moments, again, and list the conditions of your life that you didn’t decide, but just happened.

 

Did you decide that you’d be born into the family that you were? Into the time that you were? What if we’d been born in Afghanistan, or Africa, or Lithuania? What if the guys were women, and vice versa? If the black students were white, and vice versa? If your parents had ten times as much money, or ten times less? What if we’d all been draft age during WW II, or Vietnam? In the midst of the Great Depression? If we’d been born into devout Muslim families, or Buddhist, or Hindu? If we’d been physically handicapped, or extravagantly gifted in some way?

 

What might we conclude from this? That we are entirely a product of our environment? I don’t buy that. But surely there are many things in our lives that we are given, for better or worse.

 

The question, then, is what we can do to change the conditions of life in our country and in the world, and in what directions we would like to change things. More money for everybody? Leveling out disparities between rich and poor? Eliminating oppression based on race, gender, sexual preference, etc? Making the world safer? More freedom, or less?

 

It’s time now to start looking around for those things you want to focus on in the last weeks, when we have some time to focus in on “issues in modern America” in the up-to-the-moment sense. I’ve been collecting stuff for the last months that inspires and/or outrages me. Look especially for things that you’d like to bring and advocate in one way or another.