American Imperialism and the Brown Symposium

Well, for my Brown Symposium experience, I partook (like Michele) of Dr. Malamud’s presentation as well as in the final Panel presentation – I meant to go to the presentation incorporating Afghanistan and Iraq but found the Skype situation a bit much for my sorry attention span to handle. Of course, since the Panel ended up with a bit of the same, as well as immensely scattered just topically, I can’t say I enjoyed it near so much as I enjoyed Dr. Malamud’s discussion.

Now, under one hand, I found her as a presenter top notch, I appreciated not simply being read to, but on the other hand, I didn’t agree with exactly everything she had to say – yes, of course our architecture has been influenced by that of the Romans, but I don’t necessarily agree that this comes from a deep connection with the Romans, I think ours is more of a rip off of England’s rip off than anything else – Americans in general have always wanted to establish a new and yet old type of history for themselves, a bunch of “radicals” hunting for a history, a precedence to fall back on, and the Romans just happen to have a history that’s been smorgasborded by so many other countries already, why not us? Why can’t we be the best version of the same old same old – and she did touch on that a bit, but I think she could’ve done more with it (though granted, I know that’s what her book is for :p).

I did appreciate her discussion over how our concept of history is accentuated in this Roman connection, how it’s become a totally linear, “progressive” view, though I think the term “line segment view” is better. An event begins and ends, boom, history, versus the more complex, fuller idea of history as a never ending line SPIRALING forward, not a strict cyclical doowap and not an overly simplistic straight beam shooting onward and onward.

I did dig how she came about the notion of thinking on America in this way, via Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, good stuff, as Gaines said: a time traveler and border-crosser. I also really enjoyed the issue of American identity that she glanced over: America as the New Rome versus America as the New Jerusalem. I wish she’d gone further into that as well, but again, that’s why books are for.

Now, when she brought up the conquest of Hawaii, the Philippines, and Cuba as an example of our assuming Rome’s old banner of empire and wanting to be a better Rome than Britain, I had a few qualms. Fortunately, she addressed the big one but I still feel a bit restless about it. What grabbed me was the unfairness of this label because, especially with the Philippines and Chttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifuba, there was this excuse created, the idea of being a protectorate force rather than a conquering one because so many Americans began to take issue with becoming an imperialist nation. A lot of propaganda started pumping out anti-imperialist, one of my favorite political cartoons being,






which depicts ol’ Will McKinley considering imperialistic moves on the Philippines while ignoring the obvious and terrible issues persisting at home.

Her answer to this was something to the effect that America wanted both the Republican Ideals and Imperialist Pleasures of the late, “great” Rome, and that was reflected more in our architectural homage to them rather in our collective agreement that we were/are the New Rome.


As for the Panel discussion, really, it just made me wish I’d made it to something more specific, since it felt like the entire presentation was more made up of bullet points that each speaker either had forgotten about before or wanted to make sure and reiterate, a sort of sum-up for the thinning audience. There was some interesting discussion on the extreme detachment of the very rich from the rest of society and how this shapes the Imperialist Ideal versus the extremely wealthy but philanthropic of the 19th century America versus the “God through Wealth”/divine right mentality that tends to go with our super-wealthy of today. There were also interesting questions raised about where the heck were our revolts against the Republican empires of the Bush, Nixon, Reagan messes, etc. etc. etc.? Basically, as I said, a lot of random intrigues but nothing fantastically gripping. I have to say, compared to the last couple Brown Symposiums, I felt rather let down by this one. That’s probably just because this topic didn’t particularly fascinate me, but the fact that I was still there and still hopeful and still itchily disappointed felt strange and a little sad.

I’d love to be intrigued and crazed by everything, but at least I can recognize the significance, relevance, and importance of it even if I don’t get ultra-jazzed up about it, right? Isn’t that a big Paideia life goal?

Ciao for now, amigos

On Campus with Bob Hall's "Nonviolent Sexuality"

So, spent the evening with my honey listening to a Mr. Bob Hall give his lecture called “Nonviolent Sexuality”, and one that I expected to be about something in some way academic – sexual violence in literature or media and the problems therein or the inherent violence within the act of sex and societal taboos designed to down play or discourage this, etc etc etc. What did it turn out to be, you may ask – well, it turned out to be little more than a simple sexual education seminar insofar as how to say “no” and how to be comfortable with yourself in uncomfortable sexual situations. – Basically, it’s a lecture I would not have gone to hear if I’d known what it actually was because I already consider myself to be well schooled in this area, having gone through many sex education courses and seminars in my time and having thought things through for myself, and, at 21 years of age, having already had to deal with these sorts of uncomfortable situations myself. Now, if the lecture had turned into some call for education reform and how we speak about sex in the media and he’d had some interesting suggestions on what that would all entail, that would be a different story.

Really, he did speak to us as if we had no idea about these situations already – and while I recognize that some people are not as well educated on this subject or as comfortable with themselves about it as I happen to be, why advertise it the way he did if I was not his intended audience?

Granted, there were a few interesting points he hit on, such as the fact that we rarely discuss with any sincerity or frankness the connections between love/intimacy/friendship and the sexual act – which is one of those obvious things that has simply always just been so obvious that I’d never really bothered to dissect it out in my mind beyond application to myself – what this could mean for other people, what this could mean for possible sexual education programs, how we as a culture think about/market/view sex, etc.

Two other things he mentioned (but sadly did not linger on or go into too much detail about) were:
• The way we tend to discuss sex using legal vernacular – people having the right to say no at any point, threatening people against rape and violence not because of morality but because of legal repercussions, etc.
• The reason many people fear or hate pornography:
o To treat things like people is an illusion.
o To treat people like things is violence.
o To treat people like people is justice.
o To treat people as you treat yourself is love.

The pornography part actually really intrigues me – it’s been a subject of interest for me ever since I saw the documentary made over the film “Deep Throat”. Basically, I’m not a fan or buyer of porn myself, but it’s an industry of peculiar power in our culture that I just find fascinating. Marketing sex is just a weird thing, but we find it everywhere in the media, perverting what we think bodies and ages look like, perverting how we think about people, value people, how we react to them in social situations, what expectations we then put upon them – I really wish I could take that Human Sexuality class just to learn more about this. I may not need another sex ed, don’t-be-raped class, but this is certainly a heavy hitting player in the identity discussion, and that is definitely a conversation I’d like to get in on.


ciao for now neighborinos

Off Campus with "August: Osage County"

So, chuggin’ along from apple Dallas to orange Fort Worth with my Evan and his mother, the landscape cobwebby with power lines and church spires, we three found ourselves consumed the entire two hour trip by the nightmare-show we’d just sat witness to at the Winspear Opera House. It’d been Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize winning play, “August: Osage County”, and yes, a nightmare-show indeed, and one of the absolute most impressive things I’ve ever seen. Black humor, thick and hard as chalk, riddled all throughout this thoroughly American tragedy, Letts took on the near-cliché of the depressed, Southern family dynamic and whittled out a story so stunning in its possibility and reality, the very notion of cliché becomes ridiculous.

Just stepping into the Winspear Opera House, a new shiny brooch on Dallas’s sash, is akin to stepping into a wealthy, mink-coated wonderland. With a chandelier overhead, fiber optic as though they’d suckered up and screwed in some alien-giant fireflies into the ceiling, and a whir of well-dressed and well-to-dos, the three story set house hung there on the stage like a bruise on this otherwise opulent body. And it suddenly strikes me, the darker humor to be grinned at an audience of the upper classes tuning in to be cultured by the self-destruction of the decidedly lower.

The play constantly reflects and folds in upon itself and outside realities with a delicacy that makes insights on T.S. Elliott, Native American traditions, and socially complex sexual orientations and taboos seem natural, flowing out as organically as if Antonin Artud’s dream of perfect theatre as spontaneous life (or some such impossibility :p) realized. For myself, the play grabbed my interest most keenly with its applicability to America as a whole, an idea that became particularly crisp the more I meditated upon Jauna, the Cheyenne housekeeper who’s hired on to “live” in the house at the very beginning of the play by the one-scene-only patriarch (though, as always, his ghost lingers onward to haunt us all). But Jauna took ahold of me because she too seemed to haunt the play after the father’s disappearance, her presence as unseen caretaker representing for me a peculiar commentary on how we as Americans may still see Native Americans as foreigners in their own country, our home. Then there’s also the odd connection, as Evan pointed out, that’s created between her and her relationship to this deranged white family and that of the fabled Native American caretaking of the bumbling Pilgrims. – raising all sorts of questions about the generalizations and stereotypes Letts may or may not have been drawing upon when he crafted Jauna’s very specifically Cheyenne Native American character, just in need of the work.

Of course, what’s also impressive about Letts’ is the way in which he managed to incorporate and highlight the multitude of people and their issues without including any other non-white characters – a perspective of diversity beyond simply race that I certainly appreciate due to the disturbingly rising rate at which we employ the words “diversity” and “ethnicity” or “race” as totally synonymous. He adds sexual diversity, personality diversity, parenting style diversity, child rebellion diversity – everything, and all with the peculiar and unique focus upon women in power.

Even now I continue to meditate upon this play; it has so absorbed me. I’d actually really love to write a paper about this play from some angle, but no class is being particularly accommodating at this point and I don’t have the time to tackle another recreational paper at this point – I guess professors prefer our research to pertain to their classes. … Come on, guys. Come on.