First Response, "Grief and the Headhunter's Rage"

This was an okay essay. I never realized people expressed their bereavement with anger and rage. It's too bad she had to lose her friend to finally realize where the Iongots were coming from when they grieved. She too, took up the "rage" as part of her grieving process. If this actually happened, I believe that she did finally have the right to write about how the Iongots cope with bereavement.

First Response, "Arts of the Contact Zone"

This was a boring read for me. I didn't like it at all and it wasn't a page turner.

First Response, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

This wasn't really a very good read for me. It bored me and I got lost several times and I thought it was boring. Nothing really made sense for me so for 99% of the reading I was lost and confused.

First Response "Haunted America"

There were just a few things that caught my eye in this essay.

"Invaded or invader, conquered or conqueror, nearly every group had occassion to use terror as a memorable method of communication."

This kind of reminded me of our September 11 terrorist attack. It seems like that's both sides only mean of communication because after they hit our twin towers in new york, we just hit them back with violence by sending out troops over to Iraq to solve the terrorist attack. And now, because of that, anyone who's not flying can't go through security to see the person who is flying out off. That' sucks!

Another sentence that caught my attention was:

"Before they took up arms against each other, Indians and whites had to go through a substantial "getting to know you" phase. But, unlike the pattern in the musical The King and I," "getting to know you" in these situations often meant "getting to dislike you and distrust you," "getting to realize that, even though I thought I could use your presence for my benefit, it is not working out that way.""
Doesn't this remind anyone of our present time. It just seems to me like no one will help you out or befriend you unless they can benefit from it beause all society does not is look out for themselves and protect themselves - not help someone else in need.

One last thing that caught my attention was a bit funny. Just because of my original thought when I read it.

"It was not uncommon, after a massacre or vicious battle, to find a few soldiers or officers who were repelled by what they had seen or taken part in." "The loudest objections came from men and women far from the battlefield - humanitarians who registered their dismay and disapproved when they looked at the actions of the Army and hostile Western settlers. After the Civil War, these humanitarians coalesced as a significant history with real power. Army officers thus spent part of their time anticipating criticisms and denunciations from the humanitarians. These agents of Manifest Destiny could feel themselves to be besieged on all sides; constantly challenged and often outfoxed by the Indians, denounced by the Eastern humanitarians for their cruelty, and damned by Western settlers for their unwillingness to punish the Indians with proper harshness."

The reason I think it's a bit funny is because my original thought when I read this passage was "From the stories I've heard about the Vietnam War, this sounds exactly like what happened in this war". The reason it's funny is because as you read the rest of the essay Patricia references the Vietnam War quite a bit.

First Respose, "States"

This essay didn’t really do anything for me except make me feel sympathy – which maybe was the author’s goal. It made me sad because I felt like he lost his identity. In the book on page 623-624, he writes, “There are no Palestinians. Who are the Palestinians? “The inhabitants of Judea and Samaria.” Non-Jews. Terrorists. Troublemakers. DPs. Refugees. Names on a card. Numbers on a list. Praised in speeches, but treated as interruptions, intermittent presences.”

When I read, the word terrorists, I felt bad, because when I think of the people from that area of the world, I do think Terrorists, and then I think of the phrase “one bad apple messes it up for everyone”. It just makes me think that from now on, I’m not going to judge every person from that side of the world as a terrorist anymore because that phrase is correct in this case for me.

I feel bad for them all because they did kinda lose their identity. The fact that the mother couldn’t tell any of her children about anything because it was illegal to even mention anything about Palestine, makes me want to cry. But if they keep their memories of what they have close, they won’t lose their identity. At the end of the essay when he talks to his friend, it makes he happy and sad at the same time to know that he’s not alone.

First Response, "Panopticism"

I really liked how he opened this essay, comparing a town that has a plage and how you're supposed to show up at YOUR window and no one elses so they can tell if you're sick or not, to prisons and how this town with the plague is just like being in prison.

It goes on to explain the Panopticon. He writes, "that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who execises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers." I like how he compares the prisons and these prisoners to this "machine" panopticon.

The other thing I really like that he wrote is he brings all three together. "On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social “quarantine,” to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of “panopticon."

And last but not least that really got me was at the end of this well written, comparative essay. “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” The reason being is because when I went to high school, (Eagle High School) it didn’t look at all the way it does today – it didn’t have any colors and what other high school do you know of that has a fence SURROUNDING the entire school? When I started going there, before they made any improvements, it kind of creeped me out a bit, because myself and others all said that it looked like a prison.

First Response, "Utopia Achieved"

This essay seems to me like a contradiction. There's times when she talks like she doesn't like the Americans and yet in the same paragraph, she'll around and act like she likes Americans.

"This self-indulgence" (pg 118) - self-indulgence to me is a bad term. Same paragraph, " I say this to illustrate not only the indulgence, but the self-publicizing, self-justificatory violence of this society..." and yet continuing the same sentence she seems like it's all a good thing, "that triumphyalist violence which forms part of all successful revolutions."

She does this again on the next page (119), "It is this overall dynamism,this dynamic of the abolition of differences which is so exciting and which poses, in Tocqueville's words, a nw problem for the understanding of human societies. It is, moreover, extraordinary to see how little the Americans have changed in the last two centurie - much less than European societies." The first sentence is bad, and yet she turns around makes it sound good in the second sentence. Seems to me it's contradictory.

While reading this essay, I got two things. The way she writes tells me she's from Europe - however, I got that she knew an awful lot about America and told alot about us, and didn't give as much information about Europe - so is she really from Europe or just ranting cause she's pissed off at the US? And the other thing is like I was saying earlier, this whole essay is a huge contradiction. She say something that is bad about the US but at the very end of her essay she says, "Let us grant this country admiration it deserves and open our eyes to the absurdit of some of our own customs." She rants and raves about how bad different things about the US are bad, and yet she says they need to grant the US their admiration? Seems a bit fishy to me.