Doenges and Brower

I chose Doenges because I know that writers tend to have highly intelligent and developed views on life, mostly because the better writers basically examine the human condition for a living. I suppose I should have realized that "writer" in this case didn't necessarily mean author, because I was disappointed when I found out that she was a columnist, not a fiction writer, although she does mention that she tried to "write the great American novel," but was never able to sell it. It shows in the way she talks. Beneath the dry wit, she seems to be a very thoughtful person who has considered many of the major questions about humanity that we all want to know. And, with more than ninety years to do so, why wouldn't she, even disregarding the fact that her "great American novel" never made it big? I think that the fact that she didn't succeed has something to say about the American dream, the dream that anyone can be successful. It goes to show that success, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Sure, not everyone can write a famous novel which puts them on the level of writers like Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Vonnegut, but that doesn't make a person any less successful. I think the misconception that everyone could write the metaphorical "great American novel" was part of what led to the Great Depression. Everyone wanted to be rich and famous, and many were irresponsible in getting to that position, which was a common one in the 1920s. A person who could be humbly satisfied as a newspaper columnist as opposed to a great novelist has a higher chance of succeeding because of the attainability of his or her goals.

I was interested in Brower for two reasons, both pertaining to his one-word description: "environmentalist." The first is that this is a very unique occupation relative to the rest of the subjects of Terkel's interviews. It is also a uniquely modern occupation. No one called themselves an environmentalist in the sense that it is used today back during the depression or even on into the fifties. I am all for unique perspectives, so this was an easy choice. I also was intrigued by this one because my mom is a fairly involved environmentalist herself. She donates to World Wildlife Fund, grows a garden in our back yard, and is involved with butterfly watching at Ryerson woods. This personal connection made me think that I might be more interested in this person than others with whom I don't share as much of a personal connection. What I found was that despite his description as an environmentalist, his environmentalism is a small part of a far larger idea in his mind: what should the elderly be doing? He makes a good point that the elderly are the people with the most freedom because there isn't a whole lot that can be taken away from them. When a person is in retirement and suddenly finds him or herself with so much free time, there has to be something that drives a person to keep going. With Brower it was saving the environment, but it could have just as easily been education that was his primary focus. He certainly had a unique perspective, just as I thought. It struck me that he talked about his experience with World War II because what stuck with him wasn't the fighting, as was the case with most WWII veterans. Instead, he noticed the society and culture of the Germans, specifically pointing out what role the elderly played in Germany. I would be interested to know what convinced him to go in the first place and what impact the war had on the rest of his life, because with such a unique perspective on the war itself, it couldn't have been the ordinary propaganda that brought him into the war and it couldn't have been the common mental scarring that he left with.

Intro, Dante, and Stallings

The introduction to this section struck me as particularly interesting since I'm a junior and starting to think about what I want to do. What really struck me was how Terkel sorts out what is important from what's not. He talks about each worker as a human with a life, instead of a number. Shouldn't everyone be treated as a unique individual? Payed as such? And not treated as unique in the condescending, mommy-still-loves-you sense, but as an intelligent person with ideas and dreams and hopes, as were the two workers I read about. I guess it's the whole idea that someone has to do the work, and if it's necessary, then why shouldn't it be rewarded as such? What first got me thinking about this was his paragraph about turning your work into an art. Just because a person is a spot welder doesn't mean he loses all of that intensely human desire to make beautiful things. Dolores Dante mentioned in passing that she studies guitar in her free time. When I finish college and decide where to go from there, I will want to do a job that is satisfying in and of itself, not something that requires that I practice guitar in my free time, although given my current inclinations, I most likely will anyway.

When a person does a job he or she doesn't like, it begins to dull their minds. Stallings, from his description of his job, basically spaces out for eight and a half hours each day. He says that his job would be more interesting if he could try his hand at different jobs on the assembly line, and why shouldn't he? Certainly, there would be a few bad cars as each person learns a different role, but eventually the line would have a whole lot of "utility men," as he calls them. If someone gets sick, someone else can pick up their position. And, to boot, everyone would be more interested in their job because it would be a different perspective each day. I think that hearing about Stallings and Dolores really helped me understand from an emotional standpoint why workers were striking and protesting under Carnegie and the other "steel tyrants" of the early 1900s. They realized that those terrible conditions and horrible injustices were the rest of their lives spread out in front of them. Who wouldn't want something more? Who wouldn't be angry with that? Dante enjoys what she does, and Stallings justifies his staying with the job, but in the conditions of the Carnegie steel workers, it can be hard to do either.

Kid Pharaoh and Kearney

Usually, I like to write about each person I read about individually, but I noticed some characteristics that I felt would be worth comparing between these two people.

For one, both Kearney and Kid Pharaoh seem to speak about what goes on around them from a distance. Kid Pharaoh talks about society and capitalism, both very broad subjects, as absolutes. Everybody today is a certain way, he says. Nobody is really a tough guy anymore, they're all dead, he says. He talks of everyone's insecurity, and the Japanese as a people always good, the African Americans always bad. Kearney also talks very generally about young people and African Americans. However, they both have very different views on African Americans. Kid Pharaoh seems to have the impression that the 'Negro' is taking over society and that they don't deserve to. He operates on the feeling that certain people deserve wealth and certain people are good for nothing, and he believes that the African American population in its entirety fits into the second category. On the other hand, Kearney believes that African Americans are just people like anybody else who are trying to serve their best interests. As an officer, he had to deal with many different types of people, and so he gained a better understanding of the fact that everyone is a human being. In a much broader sense, Kid Pharaoh seems to be highly judgmental, whereas Kearney does his best not to judge people. Both retain and feel a certain distance between themselves and their surroundings, and both feel this distance for very different reasons. Kid Pharaoh feels that everything in society is wrong and upside-down and thus distances himself from all of the things that are wrong, whereas Kearney distances himself from peoples' feelings in an effort not to claim anyone right or wrong.

I would also like to point  out something that Kid Pharaoh says that bothers me. The very last sentence he says is, "You can be anything in this world you want to be, if you dream hard enough, long enough." It seems to me that this is inconsistent with his dislike for Martin Luther King. If he truly respects that you can be anything if you dream hard and long enough, then he should have utmost respect for Martin Luther King, given his famous "I Have A Dream" speech. Also, much of what he talks about as being corrupt in today's society is actually just what he says: chasing after a dream. Perhaps not everyone has the perfect dream, but people like the "faggot movie star that puts powder on his face" have dreams which deserve just as much respect as those who dream of being rich, of owning high-rise apartments like Kid Pharaoh does.

Ota and Basye

The thing Ota said that stood out to me was how quiet the Japanese kept this. It's interesting to me that their beliefs were that just taking the blame moving on would be the best course of action to become accepted. It is interesting to compare this to the way African Americans responded to racism, because it's an almost entirely different response. The Japanese had no Frederick Douglass or W.E.B DuBois to make fiery speeches about the issues they faced. Instead of open protest, the Japanese just quietly endured. Obviously, the two situations are very different as well as African Americans had been discriminated against since the earliest times in American history, where Japanese only started immigrating relatively recently, and the camps were the only large-scale discrimination. Even so, the outcomes were very different. Where slavery and discrimination are a central issue in American history, the discrimination against the Japanese was just one of many issues relating to a single war. African Americans demanded their rights in the next two decades after World War Two, and they got them. On the other hand, the web activity we did said that the Japanese never got a formal apology until the 1980s, when many of those in the camps were already dead. But, there is also an up side. Aside from the camps, Japanese Americans never had to go through the worst years of discrimination, those where the government approved of it just as much as the people. The camps certainly were a major offense, but that seems small when compared to the long years of the Jim Crow era and slavery before that. Relatively speaking, the Japanese Americans have been overlooked in terms of discrimination. It makes me think about what really is the better way to win rights: to boldly and loudly proclaim them or to endure and become overlooked? I don't know which is the right answer, but it's an interesting question.

With Basye, I was struck by her description of the reactions of the people in Pasadena at seeing a wounded soldier for the first time. My thought was that if that was the image the people had seen going into the war instead of Uncle Sam staring them down and telling everyone he wants YOU, people might have had second thoughts. If not World War Two, then World War One for sure. Comparatively, World War One was much less justified, although World War Two had its own set of problems. It also strikes me how terrible and heartless these people could be to write letters to the newspaper asking for these war heroes to be "taken off the streets." If I had seen a person like that, I would be horrified as well, but I would also understand that he looks that way because he felt the same patriotism everyone else felt, and he just ended up with the short end of the straw. People might have had a different opinion had they seen the other patient, the one who had a picture of how he looked before the war and how he hoped to look again someday. With that, people would get a sense that he is a human being as well and deserves to be treated as such.

Terry and Sledge

With Terry, I was astounded at the extent to which she was in the dark. She says herself, "If you can go half your life and not recognize how you're being manipulated, that is sad and kinda scary." Everything from working conditions to the realities of war, she knew nothing about. It makes me think how different a society from the one I live in it takes to create a person who doesn't question things like how healthy it is to be around the Tetryl in the ammunition and the paint remover. I suppose if you don't know anything else, then you have no way of knowing that you're getting screwed by your employer, but I thought that the women who opened the way for equal work opportunities for women would be aware of the poor conditions they worked in and be fighting for better conditions rather than being satisfied with what they've been given.

With Sledge, I noticed a couple of things. The first was when he talked about everyone's dependence on their "buddies," and how you fight for them because your country is too broad a concept to feel so strongly about. He brings up a good point with this. For a while now, I have been skeptical of the idea of exploring what it means to be an American. My first identity chart at the beginning of the year did not have "American" on it, and I stand by that. I don't deny that America is a unique country with a unique history, culture, and set of ideals, all of which I am a part of, but it is such a broad concept that unless it's brought to my attention, I barely even notice it. It's not something to fight for, as Sledge understands. He fights for his "buddies," whom he only met because he went off to fight. It's an infinitely recursive idea. It took a war to bring him together with his "buddies," but there have to be other ways to bring people together besides killing other people.

The other scene which caught my attention was the Okinawan woman. I don't really understand why he did what he did and why he got so angry when someone else put her out of her misery, because putting her out of her misery is exactly what happened. He admitted that her wound had developed gangrene and that she was going to die. It's understandable that she would want to die quickly and painlessly rather than suffering through the rest of her life in constant pain from her wound. If he really preferred, he could have let her pull the trigger if she had the strength, but if she doesn't have a chance to survive, I think it's only right to let her die the way she chooses.

Introduction and Rasmus

What the Introduction says a lot is that World War Two was the best thing that could have happened for the American people, that it changed America for the better. I have to wonder about this. I know that my knowledge of the Cold War and Vietnam are limited, but they were results of this war. I feel like there has to have been a better outcome than that. World War Two was a war similar to the first World War in that it was fought for the sake of preserving world peace. But after we ruined the lives of Japanese Americans and saw the horrible things Nazis did to Jews, we repeated the same mistakes and ruined thousands of innocent American lives during the McCarthy era. And, the peace wasn't kept because we obviously continued fighting after that and again today. So, perhaps the war was good for the nation economically, but morally America was no better off.

With Rasmus, there was a scene he described which really caught my attention. The scene I'm talking about is when Rasmus was in a basement with a Russian soldier, and the Russian was strangling a German soldier, saying that the German had killed his friend. What caught my attention is that Rasmus had the morals to tell the Russian not to kill the German. He said that even after he knew that what the Russian had said was true, he still didn't want the German to die. It amazes me that with all of the propaganda and everything pushing his belief that every German was evil, he still was able to recognize that he was looking at another human being strangled and that he didn't want to let that happen, enemy or not.

Yoder, Terry, and Owsley

When Yoder talks about her attitude towards extraneous things that aren't essential to life, she says that the views she compared herself to are very separate worlds, and I'm inclined to agree. What she says is that even now after she can afford more than just staying warm and keeping fed, the Depression had such an impact on her that even now she lives with close to the bare minimum.

My grandparents also lived through the depression, but their response was the exact opposite of Yoder's. My grandfather loves eating as much as he can and cracking jokes about eating more. My mother tells me that when she was a kid and she didn't want something my grandparents made, my grandfather's response was, "Oh, good, that's more for me then." That's basically his attitude on life. Where Yoder shies away from things that are excessive, my grandparents all revel in those things. Perhaps it had to do with how badly the family was during the depression, as it did with the doctor's daughter. Obviously Yoder's family had trouble staying warm and fed. My grandparents couldn't have been doing much better. Perhaps fed and warm, but nothing else.

With the section on Terry and Owsley, I was interested in what Terry said about how the poor were treated versus how they are treated now. She says that back then, it was understood that the poor weren't at fault for their poverty. She said that today, people feel that poor people are just lazy and unmotivated. Having no experience with anything of the sort, I wouldn't have any first-hand evidence, but I have to wonder if this is really true or if it's just one of those "back in the good ol' days" musings which the elderly seem to love doing. Obviously there's more opportunity in this day and age, but when you think about it, there has to be a lower class for the upper class to exist. It's the idea of the Golden Mean. There will always be people who aren't as fortunate as we are, and we should never just assume it's their fault. My other worry is that it is just a general feeling which she describes and not something which she actually has evidence of.