Task for Essay #1 (due February 24, 2004) The first major project is an analytic essay, 4-5 printed pages, due on February 24, in printed form in class (That means no e-mail submission, by the way).
Submit a paper which has two major parts:
1. A collection of quotations and/or statements about "America," "this country," "American character," etc. In this part of the essay, you arrange key quotations that you have collected about American character. The quotations should come from at least 10 different sources (i.e. 10 different speakers). You should arrange the quotations according to major theme or topic ("Freedom," "Equality," etc.). The major theme or topic should come out of your research. You should feel free to use your own categories. Cite the source for each quotation underneath the quotation. This part of the essay should be 2-2 1/2 pages in length)
2. An analysis of your chosen quotations, also 2- 2 1/2 pages in length. What do these quotations reveal about America? About the way Americans speak about their country? About the way non-Americans speak about their country? What is the range of opinions (e.g. if the topic is freedom, what is the most expansive idea of freedom in your collections of quotations and what is the least expansive idea of freedom in your quotations?
In this essay, you will come to some conclusions about American culture, but not necessarily a definitive conclusions. The essay will be helpful in allowing you to frame your own questions about the material we will cover in the course.
From Karen Halttunen, "Early American Murder Narratives" in Fox and Lears, The Power of Culture (1993), pp. 67-8:
"In American culture, the dominant narrative expressing and shaping the popular response to the crime of murder underwent a dramatic transformation in the second half of the eighteenth century. The early American execution sermon, a sacred narrative which focused on the salvation history of the condemned murderer, was gradually replaced by a variety of secular accounts of the crime itself which focused on the horror of murder. The cult of horror, which first became a major force in Anglo-American popular fiction during the last decades of the eighteenth century and has since occupied a significant place in modern popular culture, appeared in the "nonfiction" of American murder narratives well before its expression in Gothic horror fiction. This essay examines the transition from salvation history to the horror account in American murder literature, and argues that the historical significance of late eighteenth-century horror rests in its provision of a new way of understanding the problem of evil within an emerging liberal humanitarian culture"
From Robert B. Westbrook, "Fighting for the American Family" in Fox and Lears, The Power of Culture (1993), p. 197:
One of those occasions on which we realize that we are living political theory in the way Sandel describes is when our nation goes to war. In this event, we reflect especially on the problems of political obligation. We ask ourselves why we are obliged not only to obey the laws of our state but why we (or our loved ones) are obliged to risk our lives to defend that state. That is, with Frank Capra, we ask "why we fight." In the research in which I am currently engaged, I am exploring the ways Americans thought about this question during World War II."
From Casey Nelson Blake, "An Atmosphere of Effrontery: Richard Serra, Tiled Arc, and the Crisis of Public Art" in Fox and Lears, The Power of Culture (1993), pp. 247-8:
On the night of 15 March 1989 the federal government removed Tilted Arc from Federal Plaza in Manhattan. Ten years after it had commissioned the work for the space in front of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building and the United States Court of International Trade, the General Services Administration (GSA) ordered a crew to dismantle the enormous steel sculpture and store it in a Brooklyn warehouse. The debate about Tilted Arc conducted throughout the 1980's in the media, public hearings, and the courts made it one of the best-known pieces of contemporary public art in the United States. Opponents of Tilted Arc had condemned the modernist sculpture since its installation in July 1981 as an ugly, aggressive intrusion that obstructed the use of the plaza overlooking Foley Square by office workers in the area. William Diamond, the GSA regional administrator responsible for dismantling the work, argued that "the atmosphere of the plaza turned into affrontery [sic] " with the appearance of the piece. For Richard Serra, the creator of Tilted Arc, and his supporters, removal of this "site-specific" sculpture meant its destruction. The team that worked until 4:30 in the morning uprooting Tilted Arc from the pavement of the plaza, cutting it into movable pieces, and hauling it away for storage was engaged in government censorship of the arts. For Diamond, the sculpture's removal was a democratic triumph over "a group of elitists in Washington." "This is a day for the people to rejoice," he announced, "because now the plaza returns rightfully to the people."
Mr. Gephardt recognized early on that his 27 years in Congress might seem a disadvantage to Democratic voters. In his speech announcing his candidacy in February 2002, he acknowledged that he might not appeal to voters looking for a fresh face or "the flavor of the month."
And on the campaign trail, he took pains not to look and sound like a Washington bureaucrat. He shed the sober business suits he typically wore on Capitol Hill in favor of V-neck sweaters and khaki trousers. He talked about growing up in the Baptist Church, about his son's battle to overcome cancer and about his own hardships growing up in an impoverished family in St. Louis.
From: http://ctl.idealog.info/essays/the_american_character_and_its_history.html:
I have also heard it said that Americans tend to form friendships easily, quickly, and shallowly, and that they allow their friendships to dissolve with little more effort or time. I don't think that anyone who lives in America and who has moved much can deny this. Some people stay in roughly the same place, and thus their friendships stay in favorable conditions, but by and large it is rare in America for friendships to outlast distance. I have heard that this is different in most of the rest of the world, and I believe it.
After the attacks on our home, America mistakenly believed the people of the Middle East hated us because they were jealous of our knowledge, of our technology, of our industry. We later came to realize, as the State Department also recently discovered, that they hate us because they do not understand us. They believe democracy will hurt their religious beliefs, and that Americans are forcing this on them because we're rich, authoritarian and malicious. This leads them to see Americans as their Adversaries. This train of thought isn't just popular in the Middle East either. Even France, whom we rescued from obliteration twice in the last century, turned their backs on us because of common misconceptions about Americans. Early last year a poll was conducted in Germany with shocking results. Over fifty percent of Germans thought the average, everyday American was a warmonger.
If our allies think this of us, then what do those who are a
potential threat think of us?
They believe we as a people seek dominance and control. They believe democracy
is not freedom, but enslavement to a human placed above Allah.
From http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/digest/024/dsouza.html:
Now, more than ever, we need this higher kind of patriotism, and it is by necessity a patriotism of the reflective sort. Reflection was not in evidence when, in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, an Arizona resident named Frank Roque fired three bullets into a Sikh gas station attendant, killing him. When the police arrived, Roque explained his actions: “I am an American.” Actually, so was the man he killed, Guru Khalsa. Roque apparently thought Khalsa was a Muslim from an Arab country. Wrong man, wrong country, wrong religion. This was a rare incident, but even so it is such brutish exhibitions of nativism that convince some thoughtful people, such as philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that attachment to any tribe or nationality is dangerous and that our moral allegiance should be to “the community of all human beings.”
If the only possible patriotism were based on “my country, right or wrong,” then Nussbaum would be correct. If patriotism were inevitably to degenerate into the kind of blind hatred that motivated Roque, then we are better off without it. But one can make a distinction between nativism, which is based on resentment, and patriotism, which is based on love. The former is objectionable, but the latter is indispensable. Certainly America requires it now and will require it even more in the foreseeable future. Even when our initial anger toward our enemies has cooled, we still need an enduring attachment to our country to see it through the long trials ahead. America desperately needs the love of its citizens, for what it is and for what it might become.
A patriotism of this sort—a thoughtful and affirming patriotism—must necessarily be based on an examination of first principles. The need for this approach was illustrated by an American radio show host who recently erupted, “I don’t know why those crazy Muslims want to fight with us. They believe in Allah this, and Allah that, and they don’t realize that we don’t give a damn. So why can’t we just agree to disagree?” The reason, of course, is that agreeing to disagree is a liberal principle and that it is liberalism itself that is being disputed here. The procedural liberalism that we are so used to invoking—which presupposes that liberal mechanisms like free speech and equal rights are the best way of organizing society—is ineffective against those who do not believe that these are self-evident goods and who insist that religious truth and virtue have higher claims. We have to show why our society is a moral improvement on theirs, which is neither an obvious nor an easy task.
From http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-reldem?id=TocDem2.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=8&division=div2
Equality suggests to the human mind several ideas which would not have originated from any other source, and it modifies almost all those previously entertained. I take as an example the idea of human perfectibility, because it is one of the principal notions that the intellect can conceive, and because it constitutes of itself a great philosophical theory, which is every instant to be traced by its consequences in the practice of human affairs. Although man has many points of resemblance with the brute creation, one characteristic is peculiar to himself-he improves: they are incapable of improvement. Mankind could not fail to discover this difference from its earliest period. The idea of perfectibility is therefore as old as the world; equality did not give birth to it, although it has imparted to it a novel character.
Comments to: mao1@psu.edu