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.