Connecting to the Rest of America

      The theme of "connectedness" has been a central point in AIS class this week, as I begin to interview my average American about how they feel connected to society--whatever they define that as. But as I have seen recently, when you connect yourself to a community very tightly, there is no way that you cannot help but alienate some other group of people.

Is she representing "American values,"
more so than any other American?

      When Sarah Palin emerged as a public figure two years ago, she was heralded as a new face of the GOP, as a young voice to energize far-right supporters who feared that their party had strayed from their original values. Her appeal was that she could identify with average voters, as a relative outsider to politics. She connected, some say, in a very basic way to middle America. Perhaps she was too unconnected to politics, as her several major slip-ups proved.

      In the present day, the Tea Party movement has become of symbol of alienation in modern America. Christina O'Donnell, the new poster girl of the Tea Party has advertised her campaign as representing a "philosophy centered on the core values of the great American tradition." It seems to me that she tries to advertise herself as the most patriotic candidate, the one most connected to America. But in actuality, how can one person claim that they are more connected to America, more so than any other American? I'm confident many Americans could make that claim. When someone wants to "institute the values that made America great," how can they say that they have a better handle on those values than any other active member of American society?

      

Arbitrary Numbers

Over the weekend, I had an opportunity to travel to Peoria with the cross country team to run in a major invite. By simply traveling through part of the relatively unpopulated middle section of Illinois, I experienced a very small amount of American history, as the historian Studs Terkel chronicled in his work we read for AIS. One of my teammates commented on our hotel, saying that "this is probably where people from around here take vacations." It was very average, well-maintained but by far much less than anyone on the team would experience on an average vacation. The Stony Creek Inn was occupied by several teams, plus a couple of families there for a brief weekend vacation. It didn't appear to me that these were the average Americans who made history everyday, but my sense of a vacation is really skewed, based on what the small-towners considered a weekend getaway. Although my teammates and I only stayed there a bit, there were a lot of comments about how none of us could imagine living in such an "isolated" area. Although it would be a different experience, I believe it would be a valuable chance to live in a much smaller community, even for a day or two. The north shore environment has shaped me in many ways, but I think I'd only truly appreciate it if I lived in this different world for a week.

Slaves to Format

The first week of school brings many challenges, but one of the most pressing is getting acquainted with your new teachers' styles: how they expect your work to look, what kind of format they want on assignments, and how friendly and formal your interactions can be with them. In AIS this week, one day's discussion centered on the "proper" way to write our essay, the limitations, the format, and how informally we should be writing. Mr. Bolos introduced an interesting example when saying that he wanted to steer us away from a set format, using the term "tyranny of form" to describe how structured many of our interactions are in the technology age. We, as suburban teenagers and computer-literate human beings, are all very familiar with the layout of the iPhone operating system. The little ability it gives us to customize is restrictive to most, but in my opinion, is essential and comforting. The interface was likely designed by a team of computer whizzes, combined with designers who were likely paid thousands for their consultations, so shouldn't the final output be the best possible? The same question can be posed in relation to our "Death of Mr. Bolos" essay. There is obviously a format which works, for which the essay would best read, but Mr. O'Connor and Mr. Bolos chose to withhold guidelines which we so desperately sought. Maybe that is for the best, as it is a classroom and we have to learn through experimenting with our writing, but the fact that the class as a whole was concerned so much with the form of the essay shows that technology, such as the iPhone interface and Facebook layout, has taught us to seek out guidelines, rather than develop our own what we see best fit for the assignment. Even the blogs have, though loose, a format, which we can only master through repeated postings. The structure we live in for most of our life is important and comfortable to stay within, but some things can only be learned through experimentation.