Looking at America

Wouldn’t it be groovy to have a secret lair?

All fans of the early James Bond movies have an instant mental picture of a lair:  The villain’s ultra-cool headquarters, outfitted with futuristic gadgetry and completely hidden from the rest of the world.  Tucked away in his impenetrable lair, the villain hatches plots in sleekly modern comfort, enjoying wall-sized aquariums and artificial jungle rivers filled with pet piranhas. 

Lairs are not the sole province of the villain—the Shadow has one, as does Batman and the Phantom.  So, it would be OK for you and me (the good guys) to have a lair.  We wouldn’t have to join SPECTRE, or unleash our inner megalomaniac or anything like that.

What is the allure of a lair?  Well, the world is noisy and crowded, isn’t it?  Shutting ourselves away from it, retreating into a hidden sanctuary, seems like a sane reaction to me.  We already build cyber-lairs for ourselves.  We submerge ourselves in our iPods and iPhones that we have personalized into private universes via Our Music, Our Photos and Our Ringtones.  Our Contacts are our army of loyal minions.  And what is Facebook but a virtual lair, complete with walls?  It only remains for us to enclose our physical selves behind titanium shielding and install the cloaking technology.

You need a lot of room in a lair.  In addition to the miles of underground tunnels, corridors of laboratories, and an internal railway system with round cars, you might have to accommodate missile silos or a rocket launch pad.  You’ll also need space to tinker with high-powered lasers, and lay out little projects such as a scale model of Fort Knox that rises from the conference room floor. 

Plus, lairs are where you go to regroup, unwind, and just plain think, and a person needs lots of elbow room for that.  Lairs are therefore vast and cavernous, and in fact most are miles underground or fathoms beneath the ocean surface, where there are no boundaries. 

You could follow Superman’s example and build your inaccessible Fortress of Solitude in a frozen wasteland.  Another terrific location for a lair is a dormant volcano, such as the Japanese one refurbished by Bond villain Ernst Blofeld.  You could also excavate beneath your mansion unless, like Bruce Wayne, you are lucky enough to live above a system of deep caves.  The idea is to ensure that private use of so much real estate will go undetected. 

Another popular choice is the smaller, more intimate lair.  The key here is disguise.  For instance, the Shadow hides his beautiful, book-filled Sanctum behind a brick wall in an alley.  If you have the ability to cloud men’s minds, another alternative is to render your entire building invisible.  (According to Douglas Adams, another cloaking method involves creating a Somebody Else’s Problem field around the thing that you want people to ignore.)

Anywhere will do, really.  You just need a little imagination.  And maybe a degree in mechanical engineering.  An obscenely large personal fortune wouldn’t hurt, either. 

I suspect the movie villain’s lair is behind the recent trend for “man caves.”  Bat cave, man cave, not such a giant leap for mankind.  It’s just more grownup to say, “I need space to lay out my tools and restore my 1965 Pontiac Goat,” than to say, “I want a secret hideaway where I can play with cool toys.”

Of course, keeping a lair sparkling clean and operating at peak efficiency takes time and effort.  You won’t want to be bothered with this yourself.  You’ll be far too busy plotting schemes and spying on the outside world via drop-down monitors.  This is why you will need minions.

I am already advertising for good help, in the form of wearing a T-shirt that reads, “What I Really Need Are Minions.”  No one has volunteered yet.  In fact, the only inquiries I’ve gotten so far are, “What are minions?”  This question always surprises me, because villains sometimes get more screen time than heroes, and where there are villains there are always minions. 

Minions can be comical—remember Lex Luthor’s two doltish assistants in 1978’s “Superman”?  The Joker in “Batman, the Animated Series” has menacing minions, but please note that Harley is not a minion, she’s a sidekick. 

Minions don’t get to play even minor supporting roles in The Master Plan.  They are the background go-fers who feed the piranhas and oil the machinery.  Tip: Don’t become too fond of your bodyguard minions.  They are as short-lived as “Star Trek” Red Shirts.

But you and I are not villains, so our minions would not be cannon fodder.  Our minions would be engineers, chefs, computer wizards, and superbly trained butlers.  Our minion cadre would be happy, perhaps even to the point of singing, like the Oompah-Loompahs.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though.  I don’t have my lair yet.  (Of course, that’s what I would say.)  I have been dreaming about it, though.  The frozen wasteland is out, but I’ll definitely go the Vast, Cavernous Lair route.  That way I’ll have enough space for the cozy, lamp-lit Sanctum as well as a full-sized Art Deco movie theater.  Oh, yeah, and I have to fit in one of those LeMans electric car tracks, like the one at Busch Gardens Williamsburg.

Personally, I think a lair is well worth my investment.  To quote Blofeld, “You only live twice.”

By Deborah Shepherd

            Anna Deavere Smith’s collection of first-hand accounts about the Rodney King beating and the subsequent riots in Los Angeles is called Twilight Los Angeles, 1992.  One account in particular (“Godzilla,” page 134) helped me understand something about 9/11 that has puzzled me—namely, why some Americans believe that the U.S. somehow deserved those terrorist attacks.

            In “Godzilla,” the anonymous man speculates that the white upper-class people in the restaurant felt “involved guilt.”  The more they talked about the non-guilty verdict, the more they somehow felt a part of it.  He goes on to say that as his own fear and panic mounted, and he began to worry about the safety of his family, he asked himself, “Did I deserve this?”  Although he concludes that, no, he didn’t do anything personally to deserve it, but perhaps “generically” he was guilty.

            I started wondering why he would even consider whether he deserved punishment, when he wasn’t a jury member, or one of the assaulting officers, or even remotely connected with any of it.  I realized that it’s a natural question to ask, when something bad happens to us.  We look for reasons why.  We don’t like to think that terrible things just happen.  Even more than that, we don’t want to acknowledge how little control we actually have in our lives. 

            The notion of involved, generic, free-floating guilt helps explain why we heard so much post-9/11 talk in this country that America deserved what it got when the terrorists used airplanes for bombs.   People were desperately trying to wrap their minds around a catastrophe that shattered their view of the world.  

People in very early times had the same reaction to disaster.  When the Black Plague struck medieval villages, people asked what they had done to anger God.  Also, if a small community suffered drought or widespread cattle disease, they often blamed (and burned) the local “wise woman” either for cursing her neighbors, or bringing down heaven’s wrath with her evil ways. 

It is such a relief to people to find rational reasons for tragedy.  It’s also a relief to think they can take concrete action to change it.  We hate feeling powerless. 

Noting the prevalence of generic guilt, I wonder what influence Anna Deavere Smith’s race had on the interview process.  I imagine that it both helped and hindered her.  Thoughts?

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By Deborah Shepherd

            The piece I read most closely from Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising was “Look, A Negro!” by Robert Gooding-Williams.  Since I’m a movie fan, I thought his discussion of movies would be an interesting take on the Rodney King trial.  However, the most striking part of the essay turned out to be the Amherst College effigies, an eloquent and superbly gauged exhibition that made its point intelligently and without stridency.

A few days after the verdict was announced in the trial of Rodney King’s attackers, 40 black figures were hung all over campus like lynching victims, each tagged with a newspaper article about past incidents of violence against blacks.  Gooding-Williams writes that at first sight he and many others assumed the display had been set up by right-wing activists who agreed with the not-guilty verdict, and were announcing what should be done to the rioters in Los Angeles.  Only after Amherst’s faculty and students examined the effigies, and read the attached chronicles, did they understand that the grim exhibition was a protest against the beating and all it implied about race relations in America. 

It was a brilliant maneuver by the protestors, evoking one stereotype in order to illuminate and refute another.  The first stereotype was that only (white) racists would so arrogantly usurp public spaces to advance their hateful philosophy.  The second stereotype was that violence against blacks is a thing of our primitive past, that Americans have evolved beyond their “uncivilized” tendency to lynch their fellow citizens. 

By astutely reading cultural history, the protestors crafted a vivid exhibition that must have been as emotionally shocking at first sight as it was thought provoking after calm consideration.  Also, although the author doesn’t say so directly, it seems as though the protestors avoided any strident political slant that would have weakened its impact.

Discussion question:  We talked this week about using comedy as a subversive tool.  How about using art the same way?  Because the Amherst effigies qualify as an artistic statement, as far as I can see.

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By Deborah Shepherd

            Who would have ever thought that the words “strategic brilliance” could appear in the same paragraph as “Cheech Marin?”  I mean, you know, with a straight face.

            Rosa Linda Fregoso makes it work, though, in her discussion of Marin’s film Born in East L.A. 

I love the way Fregoso explored the symbolism of the French woman, equating her with the Statue of Liberty.  Making that connection led Fregoso to all sorts of interesting observations, about desire, about consumerism, and about the possibility of achieving the American Dream.  She gets a lot of “meaning mileage” out of this without wearing it thin.  I liked the Stephen Heath quote she uses: “Meaning is not just constructed ‘in’ the particular film, meanings circulate between social formation, spectator and film” (54).

The scenes where Rudy is chasing that woman are the best in the film.  When everyone, even the women, point out which way the long-legged beauty went, and when the fireman falls out of the tree, it’s a delicate touch of the absurd.  Even though this sequence, as Fregoso points out, perpetuates hateful stereotypes, the crowd reaction shots do suggest a united Los Angeles.  It reminds me of the parade sequence in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, particularly that great scene where the people break spontaneously into a choreographed dance. 

This quest for a Mystery Lady is also an echo of George Lucas’s movie American Graffiti.   The Lucas film predates Born in East L.A. by 14 years so is possible that Marin was riffing off that the way he riffs off the old Keystone Cops routines.  (Otherwise, the two movies are light-years apart in style and sensibility).   

I’m glad we read the Fregoso piece before we started watching the movie, because otherwise the subtexts would have whizzed right past me:  for instance, linking Ronald Reagan with that other cowboy, John Wayne, in the scene where Rudy can’t remember the president’s name. 

Fregoso’s article solidly supports the idea that humor is an effective tool of subversion, an idea I agree with wholeheartedly.  Comedy is often the only way individuals or cultures deal with controversial topics.  I can see, too, where a type of humor as exaggerated and offensive as this “grotesque realism” can serve up subversion on the side, with Fries and a Coke.

Discussion Question: Is it stretching the point to find heavy, meaningful symbols in pop culture (“low-brow”) entertainment?

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By Deborah Shepherd

            Chapter 4 of City of Quartz by Mike Davis describes how the rich upper class of Los Angeles have barricaded themselves against “undesirable” people by retreating into gated communities and hiring private security guards.  Their fear and elitism have spilled over into city planning, Davis says.  People can no longer congregate in open parks or even stroll along city streets or neighborhood sidewalks, because public spaces are disappearing.  Unrestricted public space is dangerous, fast being eliminated by walls, barriers and fences. 

Apparently, a visitor cannot mingle with LA’s native population because none of them is allowed out on the street.  It resembles the society in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which considers it highly suspicious when a person takes a walk outside.  Davis calls this repression, and by discussing it in the chapter following his discussion of homeowner associations, he makes the former a natural outgrowth of the latter.  The “Not in My Backyard (NIMBY)” mindset of the suburban homeowner has an urban counterpart in the city dweller.  The scale is a bit different: To City NIMBYs, the backyard expands beyond the immediate neighborhood to include the public streets, the blocks around their office buildings and the places they shop.

The other main difference between the Suburban NIMBY and the City NIMBY is the paranoid preoccupation with physical security that characterizes the City NIMBY.  Clearly, this proves that ignorance breeds fear and isolation breeds ignorance.  Davis’s argument is that when people are denied (or deny themselves) the chance to mix socially or at least publicly with all classes, they have no chance to unlearn deeply rooted prejudices and misconceptions.  Locked away in their enclaves, where all the faces look alike, it is fatally easy for the City NIMBY to see everyone else not only as Other but as horrifying Others.  The less they see, the more they imagine, and the more they imagine, the worse everything looks, so they hunker down in bunkers … and see even less. 

Davis labels L.A. “The Forbidden City,” associating it with the ancient walled compound of former Chinese emperors.  He ascribes a war-like atmosphere to L.A., describing the architecture in terms of battlements, castles, and ramparts.  The former Times building, for instance, reflected the “bellicose air” of its owner General Harrison Gray Otis in its “turrets, battlements [and] sentry boxes.”

(Davis also makes the interesting point that library facades look like prisons while prisons—to make them more palatable to adjacent property owners—look like high-end hotels.) 

A corollary discussion in Chapter Four concerns the LAPD’s SOP.  The police force, he says, views itself as an elite task force representing law and order in “a fundamentally evil city” (251).  The LAPD practices “prudish alienation from a citizenry composed of fools, degenerates and psychopaths,” which it is apparently not worthwhile to protect.  Davis doesn’t say so baldly, but this means that the LAPD has essentially become the publicly funded police force of the rich upper class.  The heavily armed LAPD seals off neighborhoods and housing projects as part of a crime containment policy, but criminals who prey on the poor, the homeless or the immigrant are apparently doing the upper class (and the police) a favor.

Discussion Question:  If we describe L.A.’s public spaces as a cluster of military objectives in a battleground of class and race warfare, how does that alter our view of graffiti?  By their incursions into enemy territory, graffiti artists can be seen not as powerless protesters, but as bold guerilla fighters, “taking the hill” like Marines in World War II.

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By Deborah Shepherd

Reading If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes, I was sure it must be semi-autobiographical.  The emotional rollercoaster of the main character is so convincing, it couldn’t have been written in an ivory tower by a detached author.  I Googled Chester Himes to learn more about him, and a short biography on the “African American Literature Book Club” at www.aalbc.com.

In his article “Chester Himes,” Michael Marsh discusses Himes’ personal history while tracing his literary career and it’s clear that the two are inseparable.  Himes was writing fiction in If He Hollers, but it was based on raw, often violent personal experiences as a working-class black American.  His book is hard to read because his life was hard to live.

Himes uses language and imagery powerfully, even brutally.  His portraits of the characters is unsparing, even his tormented protagonist Bob Jones who, like Himes, suffered the injustices of a segregated society.  Through interior monologues Himes takes us into Jones’s head with penetrating psychological insight.  The reader might not be able to identify with his murderous rages, but their origins are clear:  Every waking moment in his white-dominated world, Jones is beset by fear.  Living his life at such a pitch becomes emotionally unendurable; with his mood swings and hair-trigger temper, he resembles a soldier suffering combat fatigue.

Bob Jones comes to a number of conclusions, some of them unsettling, such as the peace that floods him when he decides to murder Johnny, and his assault of Madge.  In his article, Marsh intimates that Himes shared these violent inclinations. 

One conclusion, however, defines the core of the book.  In Chapter 18, Jones realizes that if he could only accept that the black man’s destiny is circumscribed by white men, then he could be happy.  He could raise a family, age gracefully and live with dignity, all within his allotted “sphere” as a minority.  But he cannot accept that, and the reason is that he grew up as an American, and he was taught to believe in the American Dream just like every other American child.  “I’d learned the same jive that the white folks had learned.  All that stuff about liberty and justice and equality. . . .” (151). Even though his adult experiences with a Jim Crow society had shown him differently, he says, “That was the hell of it: the white folks had drummed more into me than they’d been able to scare out” (152).

During this semester, Prof. Rigelhaupt has asked us to think about power, who has it and who does not.  Through the character of Bob Jones, Himes explores how one oppressed individual reacts when he is socially and personally stripped of power.  Over and over, Jones is reduced to violent outbursts because he feels emasculated. 

The question I have is like the tagline to an old radio soap opera:  Will Alice stand by Bob as he heads off to war?  Does she truly love him?  Does he truly love her, or is she just a representation of everything in American society that he yearns for but is denied?

A minor point:  If we had not read from Robin D.G. Kelley’s Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! I would not have known what Smitty by telling Pigmeat, “I don’t play no dozens, boy” (102). 

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By Deborah Shepherd

            In the reading from The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s-1990s, I was strongly impressed by the account of William Mulholland.  He was the supervisor of the powerful Los Angeles Board of Water Commissioners, and he rose to that position through sheer intelligence and force of character.  Even though the population at that time received more than enough water from the Los Angeles River, Mulholland pushed through the Owens Valley aqueduct project, which turned out to be vital to L.A.’s future.  He foresaw that L.A.’s population—along with its economic prospects—would soar and knew that the additional water supply would be the rocket fuel. 

          As author Norris Hundley, Jr. presents him, Mulholland is an extraordinary figure.  Disciplined, highly intelligent and a prodigious workhorse, he rose from penniless immigrant to influential public official.  Hired as a laborer by the first company contracted to provide water to Los Angeles, he later brokered his encyclopedic knowledge of its pipes, valves and pumps into a position on the city’s newly established Board of Water Commissioners.  His methods resulted in a water system not only efficient but also profitable. 

            One of Mulholland’s actions particularly impressed me as indicative of integrity.  After the Owens Valley aqueduct opened, many officials wanted to sell the surplus water “in order to reap the greatest profits possible” until the city actually needed the water (Hundley 155).  However, Mulholland said that selling water that the city would eventually have to reclaim would be a “base deception” of “innocent purchasers.”  His suggestion was to make the surplus available only to the city’s annexed regions. Such was his authority that this became the policy despite the loss of potential income. Such a tendency towards honest dealing over profit mongering is startling, especially in the halls of power.

            As a leader with a vision for Los Angeles, Mulholland fits somewhere between the categories of “Boosters” and “Sorcerers” described by author Mike Davis in City of Quartz.  Davis’s Boosters were cultural leaders who sold L.A. at the level of aesthetic and myth (Davis 24).  The Sorcerers were a stable of Noble laureates, scientists and engineers connected with the California Institute of Technology (54).  Mulholland the Sorcerer organized and managed the massive Owens Valley aqueduct project, a feat requiring political savvy as well as technical knowledge.  Mulholland the Booster knew just what to tell voters to get them to pay for the aqueduct, shrewdly capitalizing on water shortage fears during the 100-degree weather that preceded the first bond election (Hundley 151).

It only stands to reason that Mulholland’s shortcomings would also be larger-than-life.  A terrible destiny decreed that his sin of pride would result in widespread death and destruction.  I was horrified to learn about the 1928 collapse of Saint Francis Dam, which occurred the very evening that “Mulholland personally inspected leaks in the dam’s concrete structure and pronounced it sound” (Hundley 165).  Hundley doesn’t directly associate Mulholland’s death seven years later with this tragedy, but the titanic weight of guilt and failure must have been well nigh insupportable.

Obviously, the story of L.A.’s relationship with Mother Nature could not have been told without also telling the story of William Mulholland.  The power of the individual is one of Hundley’s minor themes:  “Bureaucracies have been important,” he concludes, “but individual Americans with their digging sticks, axes, firearms, shovels and votes … have always played a critical role in shaping the environment” (410).

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By Deborah Shepherd

            Since I grew up in a small town, and migrated to a semi-rural environment, I don’t know much about cities.  I’ve gotten a tourist’s flavor of many major cities, including New York, Boston, Rome, Seattle, New Orleans and of course (since it’s just up the road a piece) Washington D.C.  Each city has shown me a good time, and I would like to visit others.  However, I don’t think cities are good for human beings. 

Cities are fascinating, exhilarating, and totally inevitable for such a social animal as man, but I don’t believe anyone should actually live in one.  Although we glamorize city life, it just isn’t healthy for the mind, body or spirit to exist in a confined area amidst hordes of people.  People should visit cities occasionally, but leave before their nervous systems begin to shut down.  In a way, cities resemble theme parks, and that’s how they should be experienced:  as a short, intense burst of entertainment that has nothing to do with real life.

Still, I understand the allure of cities and I enjoy reading about them, especially the iconic ones.  Mike Davis has written a book, City of Quartz, about one of the most iconic of cities, Los Angeles.  Not being a Los Angeleno, some of the references Davis makes go right past me—he’s so deeply into the city, he forgets that some of us aren’t.  Nevertheless, I admire his passion and his research, and the book has been an education.

For instance, I didn’t know that L.A. was created by “real estate capitalism” (page 25).  I never thought about its origins, but now I find it almost incredible that the city exists at all, since it isn’t near a port or major trade route.  Davis says the city’s transformation from a going-nowhere agricultural village required “the continuous interaction of myth-making and literary invention with the crude promotion of land values and health cures.”  Entrepreneurs and schemers literally willed Los Angeles into being. 

Seeing L.A. as an artificial city helped me understand subsequent points Davis makes about its confused cultural identity.  “Having culture” seems to be strangely imperative to people there, especially considering the number of pressing infrastructure problems they face.  A lot of private and public money goes into museums, Davis says, but still L.A.’s cultural identity is shallow and amorphous.  The reason for that is that the city’s artists, out in its streets and neighborhoods, are neglected or deliberately shut out of funding. 

Another facet of the book I found interesting was the dynamic of science, business and the classroom that shaped the city.  Davis calls this “triangular regional collaboration” (page 56), which created a science-based economy.  Not exactly what most people associate with laid-back, image-obsessed L.A.

What a brew Davis describes:  Rocket science and Christian Science; white supremacy and exiled European literati; fads, cads and scads of money. 

Sounds like a theme park to me.

Tags: amst201

By Deborah Shepherd

The way we humans perceive the world is always expanding; it began before recorded history.  It is part of the process of civilization.  I think, though, that we have never had to adjust our perceptions as frequently and as drastically as in the last few decades.  The Internet is responsible for this, as is the 24/7 access to world news.  Technology has always demanded mental and emotional adjustments of us, pushed us beyond where our perceptions were ready to go.  In this instance, technology has made us not just aware of the larger world—that dawned on us long ago—but related to it, even responsible for it.  This perception of relatedness has weakened our dependence on previous forms of perception, such as the ones we have about nation and national identity.

I think this wider perception is why these three authors have dissected the issue of “transnationalism.”  The authors are looking for connections and patterns beyond the borders of their own nations.  In a new reading of the phrase “drawing outside the lines,” they are drawing on forces such as feminism, class and labor history to explain certain kinds of historical events, instead of explaining them in terms of boundary lines.  In doing so, they reject the long-held premise that national boundaries are fixed or even always meaningful when we are trying to understand trends and cycles.

My question is this:

As perception of our world expands to include the world, will we begin to suffer from “worldview overload” in the same way we suffer from “information overload?”  Will we begin to rely more on stereotypes than ever, because the sheer variety in the world swamps our senses? 

I think the answer is yes, we will depend even more heavily on stereotypes.  Quick, shallow labels are an instinctive defense mechanism.  Most people prefer to categorize bewildering ideas as quickly as possible, so they can move on…because the next sound bite is already on their forks.

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By Deborah Shepherd

            In Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe argues that the Asian immigrant/Asian American experience in this country has been caught in a Catch-22 between capitalism and nationalism.  On the one hand, there was (and is) America’s need for cheap labor, which Asians filled by immigrating here and taking low-wage, menial jobs.  On the other hand, there was (and is) nativist prejudice against the Asian “outsider” which the U.S. government expressed through laws that limited Asian immigration and denied them citizenship. 

            Asian immigrants were caught in a vise, unable to rescue themselves from oppressive working and living conditions because, as non-citizens, they had no rights.  America called itself the land of the free, but only recognized certain people—read “white males” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—as Americans.  Even when Asians were allowed naturalization, they were not allowed rights.

Lowe describes this as the capital imperative vs. the political imperative.  The U.S. capitalist economy wanted a willing pool of faceless, homogenous workers to fuel and increase production of goods.  However, the nation-state did not want to create too many consumers, because that would threaten the accumulation of capital. 

American policies regarding immigration and nationalization sought two goals that were mutually exclusive.  America let in an army of immigrants and then tried to pretend that they weren’t here. 

The problem of naturalization was a sticky one for Asians anyway, over and above the laws that prevented them from attaining it.  To become an American citizen, Lowe says, Asians had to profess loyalty to an imperialist nation that had muscled in on their countries and destroyed their ways of life.  Their memories (collectively) were of war and colonization.  Lowe writes, “These immigrants retain precisely the memories of imperialism that the U.S. nation seeks to forget.”  Imagine how hard to swallow, then, are the traditional American myths about equality; the national affection for Horatio Alger-type success stories; the widespread belief in a national identity.  It’s difficult for a native-born American to imagine how hard that would be.

Speaking of the myth of national identity:

Despite the horrific injustices perpetrated by “the American dream factory,” I believe it is important to hold a national identity as a goal, because the fact that Americans cherish it in the first place is a miracle.  Back during the American Revolution, there was no sense of national unity.  Colonists regarded their regions as their countries, and everyone from a different colony was a foreigner.  Somehow, “e pluribus unum” happened:  out of the many, one.  Since then, even though Americans themselves blindly divide themselves by race and economics, the ideal of “unum” has been the glue maintaining the country as a whole entity.  It would have been fatally easy for the glue to dissolve at any point.

Back in the beginning of the semester, our professor asked us a series of intriguing questions that the discipline of American Studies tries to answer.  One of them was, what happens in the gap between how America sees itself, and how it really is?  The Asian American experience as described by Lisa Lowe is a big fat example of this gap.

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