Don't Just Roll with the Waves

 

In The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Sarah Vowell creates a skeptical tone in order to demonstrate her theme that a person’s degree of patriotism should not be affected by popular events, but rather should remain at a constant level that a particular individual has thoughtfully set.  One way she creates a skeptical tone is by dissecting the movie, The Patriot, rather than fully-heartedly praising it like her fellow Americans.  Vowell presents a more critical view of the film’s character, Benjamin Martin, by reading deeper into his internal conflict of not wanting to fight the British because “he still feels bad about chopping up some Cherokee into little pieces during the French and Indian War.”  She goes on to develop this negative perspective on the beloved main character by foreseeing the inevitable future circumstances that accompany any white male residing in the pre-civil war south.   She bleakly predicts that Benjamin Martin’s newborn son will grow up to “rape their slaves and vote to be the first state to secede from the Union”.  This unpopular take on this patriotic movie demonstrates Vowell’s bold, independent nature and her refusal to blindly conform to societal trends, thus setting an example for her audience.  Vowell wants to instruct young voters to be conscientious of their patriotism. She advises them to not get caught up in the moment and blindly support their leaders.  Vowell’s “ideal picture of citizenship will always be an argument, not a sing-along,” because she will never sit back and let her leaders dictate her life; Vowell will always exercise her right to choose on every subject, even her right to choose whether or not to place a mini American flag on her front lawn.  Therefore, she wants young people to exercise that same right and to never stop thinking for themselves.  Vowell’s skeptical tone is effective in demonstrating her theme to her audience. 

Don't Let Battleships Lie in a Trench

In class this week, we discussed how the architects in "Postcards from the Trenches" utilize empty space to create a sense of absence at war memorials. According to the article, the presence of absence sufficiently represents the lost lives of dead and missing soldiers by visually demonstrating their literal absence from daily life. At the 1919 Peace Celebrations festival in Whitehall, England, absence had a visual and auditory presence when bands stopped playing as they passed the Cenotaph, marking the "place where a million British voices belonged".  However, regardless of the thoughtful planning architects put into strategically creating a sense of absence, the effects do not always resonate accordingly with the viewer.  A classmate who visited the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, Germany, reported that he did not even realize that the sight was in fact a memorial until he saw a sign labeling it.  In this case, the architect's logical planning failed to emotionally touch the viewer.  Therefore, despite the trend of constructing war memorials with the presence of quiet absence, I think that war memorials should represent the dead with colorful aliveness.  Instead of names on walls and empty coffins, war memorials should display photographs, soldiers' handwritten letters, the pens they used to write those letters, their tattered clothes, mission plans--anything real and alive that forces the viewer to feel the human presence of the soldiers, in order to make their death just as jarring to him or her as it was to the soldier himself.  War memorials should let life contradict death.

picture of Holocaust Memorial

 

 

 

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I've decided to make my blog beach-themed simply because I love the ocean.  If you love the ocean too, we can be great friends:)