Margaret Atwood: Letter to America

Let me start off by saying that this lady is not making America look bad, just our current president. She romanticizes about the good-ole-days when the nation watched Leave it to Beaver, and danced to Frank Sinatra. She goes off on this rant about how she danced to the Andrews sisters and listened to Jack Benny on the radio (565-566). Oh and we are such environmentalists, tree-hugging is our specialty because of course, we Americans always know what the world needs to be even better, we are the examples (566). This is my letter to Margaret Atwood.
Well listen lady, I am pretty sure you were preoccupied with your Ella Fitzgerald and your chocolate malt shakes to realize that we were fighting wars and social crisis all through these fantastic times. Were we not in World War II? We were not even going to aid in that war until the war came knocking at our door. We must be heroes because we won't bother with anyone else or help anyone else until we're bothered. We interred Japanese people, on the assumption that they were spies. We've involved ourselves in a pointless race against the Soviets, on all fronts, from space to fighting communism, because capitalism is key. We've fought in pointless wars before the one we're in right now, hello...Vietnam? So why do you, Ms Atwood, have to come around now complaining about our foreign policies. It's not like we were always some innocent bystander on the globe, we picked on people. I do not like this romantic idea you are trying to compare our current situation to. We jumped into another war, at the time we jumped in, it was favored amongst a huge majority of the country. We were scared and wanted to prove that we were still fierce. Well, just like any war, we as human beings get tired of the fighting and realize the problems tied along with them. But do not tell me that we have fallen off the moral wagon with this one war, this one invasion, because we fell off the wagon many years ago and have been trying to catch up with it ever since. You are nothing but an onlooker, you do not know how all of this affects us, and by reminding us about it with your comments about our Constitution being "gutted" (567), please do not put your two-cents into this, we have to deal with our mistakes ourselves without some other person complaining about us.

Response to Churchill: Crimes Against Humanity

Ward Churchill has nerve to offer some of the creative names for his fictional sports teams. I am referring to his Hanover "Honkies" and Galveston "Greasers" (538). I agree with Churchill that there is a problem of discrimination becoming fun and entertaining for the majority groups. Calling a team "Redskins" and doing hand motions like the "Tomahawk Chop," making the depiction that these Native American people are primitive and barbaric is not okay (536).
America goes through all of these phases in history where it fights for civil rights and equal perception of its people, hoping that foul and racist words will be eliminated from the American language, and then it goes off and does racist things again. How is having a red faced Native American with a big dopey smile on its face any different from making fun of African Americans with black face paint in minstrel shows. There is hardly any difference. It is appalling that Americans are getting a kick out of making fun of a group of people that were, by the way, here before their immigrant ancestors slaughtered and redistributed them around the country. If anything, we should be begging for forgiveness. But that's not how people work, we never admit our wrong doing. Instead, how about we do what Churchill suggested and start poking fun at every other minority, and even majority. It only makes it fair. Oh, but wait, that is no fun when the joke is on you.

Response to Maxine Kingston: No Name Woman

It is sad to think that in this old culture, image is everything. I do not mean physical appearance, I am talking about the facade that a person must portray to the world consisting of morals, values, etc. This poor woman was living alone, facing the fact that her husband may have left her, died, whatever the case, and she could not have any intimate contact and start a new life. She finally succumbed to temptation and had become pregnant out of her own marriage. The sad thing here is that her town found it just to vandalize her home and humiliate this woman for having a baby(391). This group of people that thought so highly of themselves decide that day not to take the high route. Instead, they frighten this poor woman into suicide.
The saddest part of this is, the mother in this story who is sharing the tale to her daughter is using this tragedy to portray a message. "Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her can happen to you. Don't humiliate us. You wouldn't like to be forgotten," (392-393). Using threats as a way to warn a girl about not getting pregnant too soon is, of course in my culture, the worst way to go about the situation. In this culture I'm assuming that threats of disowning are common and worried about. This story reminds me of "A Tale of Two Divorces," where women are afraid to act out of the social norms, and end up leading unhappy or tragic lives and endings.

Response to Roiphe: A Tale of Two Divorces

Being a child that had once been caught in the middle of a nasty divorce, I can relate to the stories that Anne Roiphe told about her mother's unhappy marriage and her own experience with a hopeless marriage. Roiphe shares that her mother was timid about divorcing, it was a black stain on her psyche. Roiphe's marriage was not a bed of roses either, and when realizing this, she did not stick around with her deadbeat husband the way that her mother had. I believe that in my mother's divorce she had experienced both feelings that these two women had. She had been brought up Catholic and thought that divorce was a sin, that a woman should try harder for a marriage to work. When she finally realized that her own husband was a deadbeat, she left him. But this was not easy for women before, the difference being that in the 50s women were becoming baby makers and men were bringing home the bacon.
It is hard for me to think about a time when women could not stand up for themselves and realize what is wrong with a relationship that they are in. I do not think it was necessarily that women were so subservient to their husbands as Roiphe led readers to believe. That her mother would make sure that her legs were waxed and her nails were painted, just so that her husband could find her attractive (205). This mother was a slave to her husband, nervous as hell, waiting for him to come home so that she could once again pretend that their marriage was happy and perfect (206). I think that the only reason women were like this was because unless they could keep the marriage from falling apart, they would be left alone and without anywhere to go. Women began going home and raising families again at this time, work was far from their brains in this culture. If Roiphe's mom could no longer fake the marriage, she would be unable to survive and raise her children in a "healthy" environment. Today, divorce is at its highest rate because people cannot stand dealing with disastrous marriages and opt out of them. This fantasy of love as oxygen (208) is over and people almost know that romantic love is the first type of love to flicker away. But now women are capable, even more so than men, to take care of themselves and their children.