The election and misrepresentation

DISCLAIMER: I am attempting to write this on the eve of the election without letting any personal political affiliation seep through. Hopefully I can.

Dear Class and fellow voters,

Here in beautiful Ohio we are lucky to get the opportunity to experience pretty much every political ad imaginable, and this year it is the worse than it has ever been. With both sides spending unprecedented millions, through both campaigns and by third party PACs, and the audacity of the advertisements has reached historic proportions. I have the great pleasure of getting up at 6am everyday during the week, and at this time of day it is literally every commercial on: one side followed by the other side, both local and national races. I thought I had seen them all, but today I got to see these two amazing examples, and it made me think of things we have discussed in class.

Professor Jani has touched on the subject of perception several times in our discussions, usually in the contexts of the novels we are reading, but the related topic of representation and misrepresentation has also come up (e.g. the NewsWeek cover). The framing and of these two ads plays on people’s fears, prejudices, and insecurities in a back handed manner to serve a purpose other than the topics broached by the political campaigns. These are two, albeit horribly one sided, examples of how certain groups related to the presidential candidates are portraying their message while simultaneous juxtaposing their opponents to so-called enemies of the US—namely communist countries, one of which no longer exists. Watching either of these ads made me sick and sad about what has become of our election process. Both ads are applicable to many different topics we have covered in class, and appeal to the culture of fear we have been over inundated with for too long.

Please take a look and keep in mind that these are just two, in my opinion gross examples from one side. If you know of other gross representations from the other side, or any side, please post them. These are just the two misrepresentations I found troublesome, and I know there are more out there.

http://ecnpac.org/videos.html    (it is the first video, top left hand corner, and listen to what is playing in the background, Gosudarstvenny Gmin SSSR)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYKAbRK_wKA

Sincerely

A concerned citizen of Ohio/US (an aspiring global citizen)

Biafra Protests

The Biafran Zionist Movement declared Biafran independence and celebrated the birthday of Chukwuemeka Ojukwu yesterday. See the BBC article here.

Disgrace Chapter 5-16

Summary of chapters 5-16

David Lurie is asked to resign as professor at a university in Cape Town after he took advantage of his student Melanie. First, Melanie withdrew from David’s class. Then, a complaint is filed against him and after further review he is forced to resign, especially after he shows no sense of regret and refuses to apologize or attend counseling.

David leaves and visits his daughter Lucy to escape scrutiny in Cape Town. Lucy lives on a farm outside of Salem, considered to be in the Eastern Cape.  He had not seen his daughter for so long and he explains how he hardly recognized her when he first sees her.

Lucy runs a kennel with many dogs and sells produce and flowers at the market. David, at first, seems to ridicule her lifestyle. Petrus, Lucy’s neighbor, helps around the farm and he is now co-proprietor with Lucy.

Lucy suggests David volunteer at the Animal Welfare clinic by helping Bev Shaw. She puts the animals to sleep at the clinic. We begin to see a new side of David as he appears to care for the animals that are brought in/and or put to sleep. 

One day three men walk onto the farm (while Petrus is gone) and ask to use the telephone. These three men set David on fire, rape Lucy, and shoot the dogs. They drive off with many stolen items and David’s car. They report this incident to the police but Lucy refuses to tell them about the raping. She tells David it is “her business, no one else’s.”

Lucy struggles to recover from this incident. David wants to not only catch the criminals, but is upset because he could not protect his daughter.

Lucy and David attend a big party thrown by Petrus and there they see the young boy involved in the robbery/rape. David approaches him and the young boy refuses he committed any crime and is not a thief. They leave, but Lucy tells David not to call the police, which of course upsets David.

Chapter 16 ends with David driving the corpses of dogs to the incinerator. He does not just drop them off there because he feels that the workers at the incinerator do the dead dogs dishonor, by not disposing of them properly. David puts the dogs in to the incinerator and cranks it himself in the most honorable way possible.

Interpretation and questions for chapters 5-16

Chapter 5 sets up David Lurie’s character to be insincere and un-apologetic. He is stubborn and instead of trying to save his job, he gives no statement, refuses counseling, and shows no regret for what he did to Melanie. On page 58, Manas tells him, “You are confusing issues, David. You are not being instructed to repent. What goes on in your soul is dark to us, as members of what you call a secular tribunal if not as fellow human beings. You are being asked to issue a statement”(58).  David does not try to help himself and refuses to “acknowledge his fault in a public manner and take steps to remedy it.”

After the robbery/rape David tries to tell Lucy to call the police after they see the young boy at the party thrown by Petrus. She refuses him on page 133-134.  However, on page 66 Lucy says to her father… “So you stood your ground and they stood theirs. Is that how it was?” “You shouldn’t be so unbending David. It isn’t heroic to be unbending. Is there still time to reconsider?” Again on page 88 Lucy tells her father “But if you want to put a stop to the scandal-mongering shouldn’t you be standing up for yourself? Doesn’t gossip just multiply if you run away?” After seeing Lucy’s reaction and opinions to her father’s “disgrace,”  how might this explain her reaction and opinion to her own “disgrace” after the rape. Does she not take her own advice? Are the “disgraces” of Lucy and David similar? How are they different?  How have these events or circumstances caused the characters to change between the beginning of the novel until this point? Have they changed and why? On page 77 he explains how he “doesn’t want to be reformed.” Yet  later in chapter 16 he is disposing corpses of dogs so that they are not dishonored. Is he showing liminality at the end of chapter 16? Has his character been reformed? Why or why not?

Another interesting topic brought up throughout these chapters was the topics of race and lifestyle in post apartheid South Africa. After David moves in with his daughter (page 95), the three men that committed the crimes against David and Lucy say that ” He speaks Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa.” This statement is a strong and significant one. They are discussing David here right before the men drive off after stealing their belongings, raping Lucy, and setting David on fire. What does this statement mean? Page 100, “Ettinger goes nowhere without his berretta” and he says “save yourselves, the police won’t.”What does this say about the government in post apartheid South Africa?  On page 117 it mentions “English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.” On page 128, at the party the narrator says “They are the only whites.” How do these explanations placed throughout the story set up an image and view of South Africa? How does this relate and tie into the plot? Since David came from Cape Town to Salem does this mean he no longer holds the power that he did in Cape Town? He is no longer a professor with power, but an outsider in this rural town? The police do nothing, Lucy refuses to tell them of her rape or call the police after seeing the young boy at the party, and David was unable to protect his daughter. Who holds the power, does anyone? Even on page 134, it is stated how “Even the days of Ettinger, with his guns and barbed wire and alarm systems, are numbered.”

 

 

Day 1 on Disgrace: Ch. 1-4

Aside from the story line of a creepy 52-year-old man hitting on young women, there are a few ideas that I wanted to address that present themselves in the first four chapters of Disgrace. I apologize in advance for how jumbled my thoughts are most likely going to sound, but I feel like there are a bunch of loose ends in these short opening chapters!

There seems to be a lot of talk about the younger generation, mainly David’s students, and his relationship with and feelings about them.  It seems David’s age as opposed to the ages of the others so far in the novel is the root of a lot of his complexity, as we are not given a character close to David’s age thus far.  He wonders how young people think and whether or not they still fall in love, but he is not interested in investigating further.  Every time David is teaching, his students are silent and he realizes their disconnect from him, calling them “ignorant.”  He does not wish to expend the energy drawing answers out of them.  Similarly, his attempts to connect with Melanie through literature and an old film are not received well and he has to resort to basically forcing himself upon her.  Conflicts arise with all of the younger characters specifically named thus far, including Soraya, Dawn (the secretary), and Melanie.  We also know that David’s daughter has “ups and downs” (Coetzee 3).  Do you think there is any significance behind the generation gap and repetition of the conflict between old and young?

 

David only expresses passion for literature.  Although he has sex with four women in the first four chapters, he does not describe any of the experiences as necessarily passionate.  Though he lacks enthusiasm for his job, he possesses it for some of the things he teaches, specifically Romantic poetry.  In Chapter 4, David asks his students to interpret passages from “Lara” by Byron.  I found the description of the passages to bear a striking resemblance to David’s character – a character who lives dangerously in a strange world.  He acts impulsively whether it’s good or bad (33).  The poem discussed is referencing Lucifer and, “Byron will suggest, it will not be possible to love him, not in the deeper, more human sense of the word” (34).  It is evident that David has some sort of deep-rooted intimacy issues in that he has been divorced twice, does not want to wake up with someone, and is happy with a woman for 90 minutes a week. He obviously has the ability to be with women sexually, but lacks the interest in knowing them further and also does not want them to know him.  David’s inappropriateness and promiscuity are also highlighted by the passage from Byron.  Not only does he sleep with a student, but he also has relations with married women and prostitutes. Do you think there is a correlation between his interest in the poets of the Romantic period and his sexual promiscuity? 

 

 

J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace Ch. 1-4

Motifs of Critical Concepts

Again we have a novel with a scholar protagonist, and so we need to be attentive to the several smart things that the author has slipped into the narration. By having the narration focalized through a professor of Communication (previously of Modern Language), Coetzee has early on embedded some very technical devices as central themes. This cues us as critics to use these devices on his own work. On p. 4, we are told what the professor’s research interests have been. Among his interests we implicitly learn the methods of criticism that he is attuned to: the concept of the gaze (feminist criticism), the musicality of language (poetic formalism), and of course historical criticism. The complexity here is that we will see instances where it is apt to call attention to the narrative’s male gaze and will also see instances where the narrative is calling an action of a character gaze. So the text not only gives exemplars of the referent of the word “gaze”, it also gives us the content of the word “gaze”. 

 

Question: What sort of implications does our own primary use of  the criticisms (gaze, historical, and musicality) have on our interoperation of these first chapters. Is this at odds with viewing secondhand the text’s own use the criticisms.

Examples.

Gaze: “glances flash like arrows” p.6, “Her outfits are always striking” p.11, “weight of desiring gaze” p.12, “stroboscopic camera” p.15, “stares out over the sea” p.19, “usurped by mere sense images” p.22

Musicality: “compliant – pliant”, “moderate – moderated”, “lover of women, womaniser”, “demand – command”, “of beauty, of beauties”, “Melanie, Melody… Meláni”, and “usurp upon – usurp”.

History: “‘It’s a long story'” p.29, “Post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate” p.32, “old prejudices” p.23, “the pentameter… now only estranges” p.16, “the instant of the present and the past of that instant” p.15, “Do the young still fall in love” p.13, “Wine, music: a ritual” p.12, “your generation” p.9, “the great rationalisation” p.3

 

Allusion

Related to the poetic formalism that the professor uses in his own Romantics class is the number of allusions in the text. These allusions are happening both at the level of narration and the plot itself. On the level of narration we have references to Oedipus, Eros, and Origen, and on the level of plot we have references to Wordsworth, Byron, and Faust. The narrative allusions all have a sense of forbidding to them as if the narrator is actively shaping the professor as a dramatic figure. The professors own allusions take a large part in his “courting” of Melanie, and feature necessarily in his instruction of the Romantics class. So again we have allusions surrounding a character that is aware of the implications of the allusions. 

Question: On p. 31 the professor must teach Byron to his class, and due to the evident similarity between himself and Byron “[it is] a pity that must be his theme, but he is in no sate to improvise”. Without this quote, it would have been easy to identify the professor with Byron, and again with his autobiographical Lucifer. So we can read this allowing the comparison to Byron, but does the self awareness of the comparison support it or complicate it?

 

Setting

The story takes place in Cape Town around the Cape Technical Institute, but when does it take place? With our previous texts, the time of the setting was essential and was explicit early on in the text. The conversation on p. 8-9 and the Sunset at the Globe Salon on p. 23 both suggest a post-apartheid ZA. This with the publication date suggest it takes place in the 90’s. 

Question: How does the lack of temporal indicators affect our interpretation?

 

Melanie

The age and appearance of Melanie has all been to establish her youth. So not only are we supposed be abhorred by his “not-quite” rape and abuse of his professorial power, we are supposed to feel icky for the great age disparity: “No more tha a child! What am I doing?” p. 20. This with the word play and the manipulation of the narrative made me think of Lolita.  

Question: If the comparison is merited, then in what ways could your knowledge of Humbert Humbert’s pedophilia inform our understanding of the professor.

The God of Small Things: Ammu’s Dream and Details of Death

This section was extremely rich in detail and symbols. I know that only reading it once is not nearly enough to grasp the importance and understanding of everything. I would like to discuss two things that really stuck out to me.

1. Ammu’s Dream

 Last week we started talking about Ammu and the relationship between her body and her cremation. Roy delves further into analyzing Ammu’s body during Chapter 11. She dreams of the one armed man (Velutha) that she cannot touch. The ultimate struggle in her dream is that “If he touched her he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave; if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win” (p. 207).  The first problem with their desire was that they could not touch each other. This brings in the obvious caste difference because of Velutha being a dalit. The other aspects of their relationship presented in this quote (love, communication, future success of the relationship) are not given much attention. The physical barrier is too strong to overcome. Also at this point in the novel, the most interaction that we have seen between Ammu and Velutha was eye connect and unvoiced desire.

Ammu’s dream is interrupted by the twins. But they are afraid to directly wake her up because “she says you should never wake dreaming people suddenly…she says they could easily have a Heart Attack” (p. 207). She is dreaming about her physical reaction to Velutha while the twins are concerned about her physical reaction to them. I believe that Roy brought extra attention to Heart Attack because of it would be a physical death to her being as well as a romantic death to her dream of Velutha.  *Pappachi died of a heart attack (p. 49).

 The twin’s reaction to their mother’s dream is also important. Estha thought that she looked like she was dying but Rahel was certain that she was having an “afternoon-mare” (p. 208).  To her children, she appeared sad and distressed during her dream even though she felt happy.  I felt like this was an accurate description of pending relationship with Velutha. Love should bring happiness but between Velutha and Ammu it is bound to bring death and sadness. 

 QUESTION ONE: After the dream she recognizes that the one armed man, Velutha, was “the God of Loss, the God of Small Things” (p. 210). Why are loss and Ammu and Velutha’s affair classified as a “small things” in this novel?

 2. The details of the deaths in the novel

 All of the deaths in this novel involved destruction or disfiguration of the body. As I previously noted, Pappachi died of a heart attack. The physical demolition surrounding his death was that which he inflicted on other bodies, not his own. He beat Mammachi and when he could no longer do that he destroyed his favorite rocking chair. As the novel continues, the family does not escape the trend of deadly destruction that he started. We have already spent a decent amount of time discussing Ammu’s death and cremation. Not only is her body decimated but so is her capability to invoke desire and lust. Sins of the body paid for by erasing her body.

 But in Chapter 13, we finally learn the details of Sophie Mol’s death, the most central one to the narrative. When her body was laid out, “it was obvious that she was dead” and did not look like her living self (p. 238).  She had weeds in her hair, her face had been nibbled on by the fish, and she was wrinkled. She was completely disfigured. Her drowning had transformed her into a “spongy mermaid who had forgotten how to swim” (p. 238). The body that was hers now belonged to death.

QUESTION TWO: Do you think that the details of these deaths classify as small things? Why do you think that Roy primarily used tragic and non-normative deaths? 

Discussion 10/24: A Not So Small Section of The God of Small Things

Summary: Chapters 10-14

Chapter 10 begins with Estha alone in the pickle factory while everyone else celebrates Sophie Mol’s arrival. He has Two Thoughts. Rahel then joins him, and they decide to visit the History House together. They run into problems, and end up in Velutha’s hut, talking to his brother. In Chapter 11, Ammu dreams of a one-armed man. She wants him to make love to her, but the presence of others prevent his from happening. The children wake her up gently, and she tells them that she was happy in her dream. She then allows them to play with her stretch marks, only after she scolds them for visiting Velutha. In chapter 12, the twins watch kathkali dancers act out a play. They sit separately, but are bound by the story. It lasts all night. They then walk home silently. Chapter 13  begins with Sophie Mol waking in the Ayemenem house, not thinking of her deceased father. There is then a flashback to the story of Chacko and Margaret Kochamma. The story of the “Man with Twin Sons” happens, and we learn about the troubled marriage between the two. We finally learn the story of Sophie Mol’s death. We also learn about Ammu and Velutha’s affair, through conversations between Vellya Paapen and Mammachi. Velutha becomes named “The God of Small Things.” The chapter ends with “Sophie Mol became a Memory, while The Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. Like a fruit in season. Every season.” (p. 253). In chapter 14, Chacko visits Comrade Pillai’s house. He wants Comrade Pillai to approve a new label for the factory’s newest product, Synthetic Cooking Vinegar.

A lot happened in this section of the novel, obviously. It was very dense, and I’m still not certain that I caught everything that occurred. I know for a fact that I did not understand the meaning behind everything that happened in these chapters. There were a few things that I noticed that I would like to further discuss: the theme of innocence, the symbol of eggs, and the reference to the novel’s title.

One theme I would like to look at is that of innocence. There are many examples of this in the novel, most notably two in the section that we read. The first occurs right at the beginning of chapter 10. It is when Estha is thinking to himself in the Pickle Preserve kitchen. “As Estha stirred the thick jam he thought Two Thoughts, and the Two Thoughts he thought were these: (a) Anything can happen to Anyone, and (b) It’s best to be prepared.” (p. 185-186)

At first glance, I knew that this was something important, as it is capitalized. Roy seems to capitalize anything that is an important idea, theme, or motif. It also stands out that Estha is completely alone when he has these thoughts. These “Thoughts” come as a response to the fear that he has that the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man will come and find him. This scene shows that he has a loss of innocence, because of his sexual abuse, and that his view of the world has changed. He changes from a naïve child to an individual taking responsibility for his survival. He has these profound thoughts that allow him to plan his own escape from his grim reality, and immediately turn Thoughts into Actions.

Another example of innocence in this section occurs when the twins wake Ammu from her afternoon slumber.

“‘If you’re happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count?’ Estha asked. ‘Does what count?’ ‘The happiness-does it count?’ She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff. Because the truth is, that only what counts counts. The simple, unswerving wisdom of children”(p. 208).

This shows that Estha wishes to prove to Ammu that kids may be simple in many ways, but their simplicity is profound and can teach us a lot. This moment resurfaces later in the novel, proving that this moment of innocence sticks with Ammu. Estha gets at something that Ammu had not thought about, the fact that her happiness in a dream may actually mean nothing to her actual life, and that she needs to look at the things happening around her, and truly focus on her life, in order to be happy. She cannot rely on dreams, and fantasy to please herself.

Aside from the theme of innocence, another recurring idea I found is that of a symbol: eggs. This symbol seems to usually appear when something bad is happening; often a death., or when something is going to go awry. The novel makes mention to eggs when Chacko is at the café, where he first speaks to Margaret Kochamma, “She winced when he put two heaped spoons of sugar into his extremely milky coffee. Then he asked for fried eggs on toast” (p. 228). The symbol appears again after Joe dies, “Finish your homework. Eat your egg. No, we can’t not go to school” (p. 237). Once Sophie Mol dies, the symbol appears once again, “And this time there was no homework to finish or egg to eat” (p. 249). This may mean absolutely nothing, but I thought it was worth mentioning that eggs were brought up in a lot of instances in which things weren’t quite right, people died, or families were disrupted. Another mention of “egg” occurs when speaking of Rahel and Estha, always referred to as “two-egg twins” (p. 248).

Finally, and probably most importantly, this section makes reference to the novel’s title, The God of Small Things. Two individuals are mentioned by this title. The first is the man in Ammu’s dream. This dream is significant to the overall tone of the novel. The first important point in this dream is the fact that the man only has one arm. He is flawed, missing part of himself, and yet he is the one to make Ammu happy. The fact that he is missing one arm, and can only focus on one task at a time is also important. In the real world, the title is given to Velutha. “Of him she had no memory at all. Not even what he looked like. Perhaps this was because she never really knew him, nor ever heard what happened to him. The God of Loss. The God of Small Things.” This draws a parallel between the man of Ammu’s dreams, and the man with whom she has an affair.

I apologize for the length of my elementary understanding of this novel. I think now’s a good time to stop and ask some questions so I can stop making a fool of myself.

Questions:

1. What is the importance of the capitalization of Estha’s “Two Thoughts”. What do these Thoughts tell us about Estha as a character?
2. Why are eggs brought up both when Joe dies and when Sophie Mol dies? Why are eggs so prevalent in the novel?
3. Why is there a connection between the one-armed dream man and Velutha? Why are these men the individuals who are refereneced in the title of the novel?

Teaching the Background of Middle East Culture to Adolescents?

Last week in my Literature for Adolescents class (EDU T&L 3356), we read a novel titled Wanting Mor by Rukhsana Khan. It was a well written story about a young woman who grew up in a very poor area in Afghanistan, that was majorly effected by by the war. She deals with many tough obstacles in her lifetime such being born with a cleft lip, her mother passing away, moving to Kabul and getting abandoned by her father, and having to spend a portion of her life in an orphanage that was ran by people who killed members of her family. This story is a perfect example of life going on in the Middle East.

In our class discussion, the question arose “if this novel should be given out to read in a high school English class?” My first reaction was YES. I thought that this novel, along with everything that we have read in our World Lit class, shows great examples of the lifestyle in the Middle East. Then I backtracked and thought to myself how much knowledge I lacked about the Middle East before enrolling in this class and having discussions. Which is why I came to the conclusion, if someone was going to assign this novel for their high school class to read, then they better be sure their students have some kind of understanding on the culture and background of the Middle East. But that may be difficult to do in a short period of time, oppose to an entire semester on becoming familiar with it.

~Nate

Day 3 on The God of Small Things (Color, Subalternity)

A short summary: in chapters 8 and 9, Sophie Mol and everyone make their way home to the Ayemenem House. Mammachi is waiting there, playing violin. In the moments before everyone arrives, she fades back in memory to the start of the pickle business and we explore her abusive background and feelings toward her son. Workers file out of the pickle factory and Sophie Mol arrives. The adults “put on a play” for their guests until Margaret gets all orientalist and Ammu lashes out. Ammu and Velutha develop unspoken feelings for each other. We flash back to Ammu’s youth. Estha, Rahel, and Sophie Mol visit with Velutha, and Roy continues to lay on the foreshadowing. “Things can changed in a day.”

Not bad for under 30 pages.

A couple of things that stuck out to me from these chapters were some mixed motifs and a few good examples of the subaltern theme.

The first motif to pop up in Chapter Eight is elevation. Nine steps lead the way from the driveway up to the Ayemenem House veranda. Red steps also come up at the Abilash Talkies and the hotel that the family stays at. Color meets motif. The communism associated to the communist party contrasts with the elitism represented the staircases.

These contrasting ideas hint at one of the prevailing themes in The God of Small Things: subalternity. Every notion of power in the novel’s relationships is relative. Social caste is one of the important determinants of elitism. The Ipe family is certainly elevated above Velutha’s family. However, other dynamics are in play in the novel’s web of relationships. While Mammachi is elite to Velutha, she is very much subaltern to her husband. The shifting nature of subalternity vs. power is evident in Ammu’s reflection on the past. “In her growing years, Ammu had watched her father weave his hideous web. He was charming and urbane with visitors, and stopped just short of fawning on them if they happened to be white…But alone with his wife and children he turned into a monstrous, suspicious bully, with a streak of vicious cunning” (171) The senior Ipes are simultaneous elite and subaltern depending on their social company. Within their marriage, power is securely Pappachi’s.

Kochu Maria also exemplifies a subaltern voice struggling to stay up in the hierarchy by putting another down. She works under the family, in the kitchen, but sees her Christianity as an elevating force. When she claims that someday Sophie Mol will be the superior to Maria and Rahel, Rahel explains her plans to move to Africa. “’Africa?’ Kochu Maria sniggered. ‘Africa’s full of ugly black people and mosquitoes’”  (175).

Even Ammu, abused by her father and insulted by Margaret, is elite (and sometimes unjust) to her children. In chapter seven, Rahel finds an old notebook of Estha’s. In it, a not from Little Ammu: “If I am Talking to somebody you may interrupt me only if it is very urgent. When you do, please say ‘Excuse me.’ I will punish you very severely if you disobey these instructions. Please complete your corrections.”  Here’s another example of bullying breeding bullying, and its corollary on the societal scale.  

Without rambling any more, some things to consider going forward in the novel are

1. Where else do we see colors and what themes are they suggestive of?
2. Do we think of any characters as exclusively elite or exclusively subaltern?
3. What information do we currently have about “The Terror” and what do we think it was/will be?

Sorry for the late post. For the class’ enjoyment, one of the songs played by Mammachi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLOMap0XuGg

“Manifest Destiny” T-shirt

Here is another example of fashion design choices which have caused controversy among educated minds.

http://shine.yahoo.com/fashion/gap-pulls-manifest-destiny-t-shirt-gets-history-025900453.html

According to the article, many found the shirt to be “grossly offensive,” glorifying the murder of indigenous people, while others see it as a type of American patriotism (???).

What do you guys think?