First, I say without reservation that I do enjoy being a guinea pig- to an extent of course. I honestly do enjoy experimentation in the classroom, whether it works out as planned or not. Either way it's new, different, and at least holds potential for improvement (not that I have any qualms with the class now or think it necessarily needs improvement). Though the TiffanyScreens software was not overly cooperative (despite it's perky title) there was one aspect of it that I really enjoyed. It allowed us the opportunity to see how the different groups approached the same question from radically different angles and have a more diversified approach to discussion. For example, I enjoyed both the group who presented similar themes found in much older writings and the group who presented the banned cartoons illustrating those same ideas. Not that I wasn't a fan of the Wikipedia page and medical manifest destiny too.
As for the actual course of our discussion and Manifest Destiny itself, I feel we focused to much on particulars to get to what really deserved clarification. Yes, we established that the United States is and always has been a very religious state, despite popular belief to the contrary, which Stephanson did an excellent job of narrating. I felt that the specifics of which particular religions were involved got in the way of discussion on the idea as a whole. It was important that the Protestants were so involved in the formation of American ideals, but in the spread of Stephanson's work, "Protestant," could have been replaced with nearly any branch of Catholicism or bible-following religion and history would have followed the same flow. Stephanson's point that the idea of a religious mandate for a "manifest destiny" sprouted from biblical teachings and not any teaching peculiar to the Protestant following.
I think what best sums up my thoughts on this entire work are the things that went through my head upon viewing that tasteless Looney Toons depiction of Japanese culture:
Are there really people in positions of such power (yes, Looney Toons is a position power) that are so close minded and willing to misdirect our society's perceptions? Well, I suppose it's nothing new, this has been happening ever since those religious fanatics came to this continent with their ideas of superiority and a manifest destiny...
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2 comments:
My point in insisting that the United States' version of chosenness (in the form of Manifest Destiny) is Protestant is that it has profoundly influenced American culture. One does not have to look any farther than to our views of sexuality and nudity to see what is uniquely Protestant, not Catholic, our morality is. History would not have taken the same path if the United States had been founded by Catholics or even Lutherans. Stephanson explains that predestination is a vital part of the United States' religious tradition.
Point taken though - as we said in class, many societies cloak themselves in all kinds of religious dogma to explain their actions and atrocities.
I find it funny that people are shocked to see things like the Looney Tunes cartoon. This is how all wars were fought for a very long time. It's the only way to fight a war - you can't sympathize with the enemy at all, or else he ceases to be your enemy. The fact that it is now impossible to achieve such propaganda saturation is the source of my position that it is impossible to win a postmodern war. I'll save that for a dissertation, though.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "propaganda saturation," but I really don't think that propaganda no longer works. For one thing, propaganda was never meant to convince everyone that what it said was the absolute truth. Propagandists knew that many people would question what they were told, but the propaganda did spread the general sentiment that the enemy as a whole was bad.
Looking at today, propaganda may not be as blatant as leaflets or those cartoons, but the way the news media portrays the enemy still fosters ill-will toward their population as a whole. People may get mad when airport security targets "possible terrorists" based solely on the way they look, but if you talked to just general people off the street (and by street, I don't mean the pathways through the quad here at AU) you'd probably find that most people think that Afghanis and Iraqis in general are bad.
Again, maybe I misunderstood what you meant by "propaganda saturation," but as far as I'm concerned, today's propaganda works as well as ever.
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