A Spy, An Interpreter, and A Model: One Classy "Soldier"

While exploring various wars in class, we learned about each conflict's immediate causes, the goal/rationale, and then we primarily discussed its outcomes in terms of the United States.It makes sense that we'd focus on the war's effects mostly on America because we're American and since we're in American Studies, but I wonder how did these wars effect other nations, those directly involved, and those indirectly involved? I thought it would be interesting to share a very unique account of World War II as seen through the eyes of my grandmother, Lysiane Wagner Sutherland. 

Lysiane was in her twenties when her home city of Brussels, Belgium was taken over by the Nazi Germans. She lived alone with her mother, a baroness, in a castle. Their estate was invaded by a German pilot and his family. My grandmother and her mother, keep in mind they're Belgium royalty, were ordered to cook and clean for the Germans, powerless in the confinements of their own home. Being the determined and unbelievably strong willed woman that she was, Lysiane decided she would use her unfortunate situation as fuel to forge her way in combatting the war against the denial of the Four Freedoms. She became a spy for America, trading secrets and undisclosed information to General Eisenhower. Since she was fluent in seven languages, she also worked as an interpreter. In compensation for her espionage work, Lysiane was decorated by General Eisenhower and flown to the United States on his private plane. 

A pretty amazing story, huh? I cannot deny that I have and always will consider my grandma's story heroic. Even so, On the Rainy River, the short story we read by Tim O'Brein makes me look at her narrative through a different lens. While O'Brein did (courageously?) fight for his country in the Vietnam War, he considered himself a coward for he went for the wrong reasons. While my grandma had no resistance to her public service, think about all of those she betrayed and hurt in disclosing information to the Americans. Any conversation she had-whether with family, friends, or acquaintances-was taken as evidence for German exile, as a warrant for defending the Four Freedoms. Inevitably, through disciplining traitors, innocent lives were lost. They lives were involuntarily sacrificed for the greater good of not not simply Belgium, of not solely America, but of the entire world.  This adds even more questions to our class conversation of how to justify the worth of a single life. Can and should one life be sacrificed for the protection of a thousand lives? 

With something as abstract as war, I don't think answers can ever be fully determined to a question like "is war ever justified?" However, their answers are ever changing, ever evolving from conflict to conflict, from person to person. I do know that I count myself extremely lucky to have such an interesting slice of history in my ancestral descent. 

P.S. While this doesn't have much to do with our unit on war, I thought some might be interested to know that after coming to America, my grandmother became a Christian Dior model and married my grandfather, who was the voice of Thumper in Bambi. 

Racial Outliers

After reading the excerpt in class of Malcolm Gladwell's: Outlier's-The Story of Success, I was so intrigued by his asterisk to America's dominant narrative of success that I decided read the book in its entirety. Along with his 10,000 hour rule and theory that arbitrary advantage and luck play as large of a role-if not larger-than innate talent in the equation of true success, Gladwell brings up many other fascinating points. However it is not until the end of the book that he truly brings his theories full circle.

In the book’s last chapter, readers gain an insight into Gladwell's family history and discover that the success of his relatives were not just of their own making, but depended on opportunity and legacy, on history and community. He ties the lives of his family as a foundational warrant to prove his final claim. However, what stood out to me the most out of this last chapter was not the remarkable power of opportunity and luck in the story of sucess, but something that connects back to our unit on agency and oppression.

Gladwell’s relatives lived on the island of Jamaica. In Jamaica, the plantation owners extracted the maximum possible effort from their human property while the property was still young. They worked the slaves until they were useless or dead, and then simply bought another round of slaves at the market. They had no problem with the philosophical contradiction of cherishing the children they had with a female slave, while simultaneously treating their slaves as property. Thus due to the inhumane treatment of dark skinned slaves, the lighter-skin classes-or brown skinned- blacks in Jamaica came to be regarded as worthier, for they were partly of white blood. Very stark divisions divided the dark skinned from the brown skinned. These divisions were most apparent within the family structure, which ultimately lay the foundation for the public manifestation of color prejudice: “the most lightly colored will be favored at the expense of the others…the darker members of the family will be kept out of the way when the friends of the fair or fairer members of the family are being entertained” (Gladwell 282).

In our agency and oppression unit, we talked in depth about the oppression of whites onto blacks and the agency between blacks. However, we did not talk about the existence of oppression within a single racial group. Rather than uniting and creating agency to empower their racial status, the blacks created further division within their own race by essentially segregating the darker skinned from the light skinned. Not only did this most likely delay their attainment of equal rights, but it also reflects an approval, rather than a defiance, for what the whites were doing. It sends the message that superficial divisions based on skin color are acceptable. Perhaps this is a commentary of what one will do to rise up the social ladder. Regardless of familial ties, friends, and the belief that “all men are created equal,” it appears that people will do whatever necessary to gain, or remain in power. 

Are YOU in Good Hands?

In class a few weeks ago, we looked at advertisements and analyzed the appeals companies were selling along with their commodity. Ever since this exercise, I've become very conscious of how manipulative advertisements are, for along with their actual product, they sell what they know their viewers are hungry for. Often times this includes the appeals of popularity, success, beauty, and happiness. Considering the monumental impact our current economic recession is having on America, it only seems appropriate that advertisements are using this financial situation to gain pathos and logos in selling their products. While watching TV, I came across a specific AllState commercial that exemplifies how useful this tactic really is. 

The commercial opens to images of the desparity of the Great Depression and announces that AllState opened its doors in 1931. This important fact adds credibility to AllState's ethos, for it lets the viewer know AllState survived the Depression, and infers that AllState's main goal is to help the average person, especially those suffering from financial loss. The ad then stresses an emphasis on "it's back to basics," claiming that these difficult economic times allow for families to become closer. AllState insinuates that they are a part of that family, and a part of that close bond. This tugs on the the viewers pathos. 

Many different companies are using the recession as amunition to fuel their quest to sell their product. Is this ethically right and sensitive to the times? Perhaps not. But AllState has me sold!