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One of my heroes, Jon Stewart, as the Daily Show returned to air after the attacks on 9/11/2001. He captures the pain and confusion of that moment in his uncharacteristic earnestness and tears.

Favorite Class/Moment in After 9/11

I figured that since we have come to out last class of the semester it would be interesting to have a review of the class and share some of the highlights some people have had over the semester.

I know for me, besides my special project, I enjoyed reading the poems and listening to the songs about 9/11. They provide for great reflection to one of the most prominent events in American history. I remember being moved by some of the poems we read, especially "Messages from the Sky". Even if someone young does not know about 9/11 they can still come to know the truth that the poem reveals to us. That humans and truly and intimately bound by love. It is the most universal human saying, "I love you." Despite all the terrible things that 9/11 brought to the world it did unify us as a people and on 9/11 our hearts went out to those who were suffering. I think that these poems and songs were great because they conveyed the truth about 9/11 that the facts cannot get at. Reading them gave me very interesting insight to 9/11 that I had not thought before.

Outside of that I really enjoyed doing my special project. As I said in my presentation, I knew very little about drones and I learned a lot in my research. I also found it interesting framing it in the context of 9/11. Ethics is a very important part of life and I had never thought about the moral implications of something that had been a after effect of 9/11. My project was definitely the summit of the class for me.

Cyber-Terrorism

Since Jon's presentation about cyber-terrorism, I have been quite interested in looking up this new kind of "warfare". I have come to think that it could totally change our world in the next few years. Hacking groups, such as LulzSec, Anonymous, Masters Of Deception (MOD), and Milw0rm have potential to do many things that could cause much destruction. For example the group Milw0rm hacked into the systems of Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) which is the main nuclear center in India. What would happen if someone in the group just wanted something at that reactor site to go wrong. It could potentially kill millions of people. There is a lot of power and responsibility on the internet. As some have said. It could even be the next form of terrorism. In my opinion, it is even scarier than people who run planes into buildings because a terrorist/hacker does not even have to leave the comfort of his or her home to do things of potentially very destructive nature. These people are also good enough that it is very hard to track and find them. Just as we had to look for terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan, we will have to look for them in the streaming and endless world of digital information. It might just be easier to find them in the mountains.
 Now to go to somewhat of a tangent. Recently, the government has attempted to cut down on internet crime such as this with acts such as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). This was however not well received by the American people. The acts could very easily lead to violation of personal information and privacy laws. This would give some people complete authority to go where ever they needed to go to find information and it would also give them the authority to take a website completely offline without any red tape. Those acts thus failed, but the government will not stop trying. They now are trying to pass CISPA, or the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. I will attach an article from a few days ago for reference. We just have to keep in mind that our rights are at stake when the government gets involved with the internet. Is it worth the cost just so the gov. can stop some online piracy? What do people think? Do you think that it will solve cyber-terrorism of will we ever be able to stop it?

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/23/ron-paul-cispa-cyberterrorism-bill?newsfeed=true

Point of View

Bethany's recent presentation on the terrorist stereotype throughout literature brought me back to Hayan Charara's visit to our class and his reading the same night in Rodman, both of which were extremely thought provoking. His words and readings tied in extremely well with the overall goal of the class. I found the most interesting aspect of Charara's work to be his decision to focus on his personal aspect of the post 9/11 world. Being an Arab American, Charara has had to experience a completely different aspect of the attacks on 9/11 than most Americans would have to experience. Because he is of similar ethnicity as the terrorists on 9/11, Charara has gone through a number of different trying times associated with the hatred and racism towards the Middle Eastern community.

After hearing his readings I was struck by his decision to focus on the perceived "attackers" rather than most of the other material that we have read which focused on the victims of 9/11. In one of my classes this semester we read and discussed Truman Capote's In Cold Blood in which Capote focuses the majority of the story on the two murderers of the Clutter family.

I was curious as to what impact this has on a reader? Is there a major difference between focusing on the victims or focusing on the guilty party? Do you think that one is better than the other? Or if this raised any other points of interest or questions.

A Must-Watch Video On How Military Drones Are Changing War

Hey guys,
Here is a video on drones and there affect on warfare that I watched while writing my special project. You may find it interesting and informative. Hopefully it can spark some dialogue.

http://gizmodo.com/5878417/a-must+watch-video-on-how-military-drones-are-changing-war

Our Present-Day Will Become History: Portraying 9/11 to Future Generations

After reading David Rieff’s article, “After 9/11: The Limits of Remembrance,” I’ve considerd how we will portray the attacks of September 11, 2001 as an event in history. For our class, excluding our professors, these attacks mark the first largely infamous event that affected America in our lifetime. With that being said, I think it is important to consider how we view events in history that we have not experienced. Accordingly, we must consider how we will portray the events of September 11 to the generations of people in the future who will only have our stories as a means of understanding.

I started thinking this way after considering Rieff’s comparison between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. I don’t know many people—aside from my grandparents—who lived during the time of the attacks on Pearl Harbor, so the only knowledge I have about this tragedy comes from a history textbook. I started thinking that this medium of communication could be highly dangerous. If we only communicate events in history through one medium, that medium becomes the monopoly on the topic, and we receive a one-sided account.

Considering this danger, I think we should practice caution when we plan to portray the events of September 11 to future generations. For me, it’s hard to fathom that someone will only know of the attacks through word of mouth. However, this concept will become a reality in the near future, as our youth will learn about this event from a textbook.

With that being said, I wanted to pose some questions to the class. How do you think we should portray these events? Should we take any specific precautions? Should we teach them, like Rieff suggests, to move on and eventually forget the events?

To answer my own question, I would advise using caution when portraying al-Qaeda, because I can see our anger influencing future generations and ultimately perpetuating violence. I would take caution against portraying the events with an “us versus them” mentality, for I could see our grievances overflowing onto future generations. Do you agree? Disagree? Suggest otherwise?

Iran a Potential Cyber Threat?

Jon, just going off of your project and your main focus in your education here at Carroll, I thought you might be interested in this. It's a little different from a majority of the concerns being raised up until this point. A lot of the focus has been on China and potentially Russia, but not a lot of attention has been on Iran. This ties in nicely with America's standing in the post 9/11 Middle East and how it has been impacted by decisions made by the United States government.

http://www.npr.org/2012/04/26/151400805/could-iran-wage-a-cyberwar-on-the-u-s

39 Ways to Limit Free Speech

More evidence for Danner's claim about our state of exception.

39 Ways to Limit Free Speech

David Cole

Sudbury Police Department

Tarek Mehanna

Google “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad” and you’ll get over 590,000 hits. You’ll find full-text English language translations of this Arabic document on the Internet Archive, an Internet library; on 4Shared Desktop, a file-sharing site; and on numerous Islamic sites. You will find it cited and discussed in a US Senate Committee staff report and Congressional testimony. Feel free to read it. Just don’t try to make your own translation from the original, which was written in Arabic in Saudi Arabia in 2003. Because if you look a little further on Google you will find multiple news accounts reporting that on April 12, a 29-year old citizen from Sudbury, Massachusetts named Tarek Mehanna was sentenced to seventeen and a half years in prison for translating “39 Ways” and helping to distribute it online.
As Anthony Lewis was wont to ask in his New York Times columns, “Is this America?” Seventeen and a half years for translating a document? Granted, it’s an extremist text. Among the “39 ways” it advocates include “Truthfully Ask Allah for Martyrdom,” “Go for Jihad Yourself,” “Giving Shelter to the Mujahedin,” and “Have Enmity Towards the Disbelievers.” (Other “ways to serve,” however, include, “Learn to Swim and Ride Horses,” “Get Physically Fit,” “Stand in Opposition to the Disbelievers,” and “Expose the Hypocrites and Traitors.”) But surely we have not come to the point where we lock people up for nearly two decades for translating a widely available document? After all, news organizations and scholars routinely translate and publicize jihadist texts; think, for example, of the many reports about messages from Osama bin Laden.

In 2009, Tarek Mehanna, who has no prior criminal record, was arrested and placed in maximum security confinement on “terrorism” charges. The case against him rested on allegations that as a 21-year old he had traveled with friends to Yemen in 2004 in an unsuccessful search for a jihadist training camp in order to fight in Iraq, and that he had translated several jihadist tracts and videos into English for distribution on the Internet, allegedly to spur readers on to jihad. After a two-month trial, he was convicted of conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization. The jury did not specify whether it found him guilty for his aborted trip to Yemen—which resulted in no known contacts with jihadists—or for his translations, so under established law, the conviction cannot stand unless it’s permissible to penalize him for his speech. Mehanna is appealing.
Under traditional (read “pre-9/11”) First Amendment doctrine, Mehanna could not have been convicted even if he had written “39 Ways” himself, unless the government could shoulder the heavy burden of demonstrating that the document was “intended and likely to incite imminent lawless action,” a standard virtually impossible to meet for written texts. In 1969, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court established that standard in ruling that the First Amendment protected a Ku Klux Klansman who made a speech to a Klan gathering advocating “revengeance” against “niggers” and “Jews.” It did so only after years of experience with federal and state governments using laws prohibiting advocacy of crime as a tool to target political dissidents (anarchists, anti-war protesters, and Communists, to name a few).

But in Mehanna’s case, the government never tried to satisfy that standard. It didn’t show that any violent act was caused by the document or its translation, much less that Mehanna intended to incite imminent criminal conduct and was likely, through the translation, to do so. In fact, it accused Mehanna of no violent act of any kind. Instead, the prosecutor successfully argued that Mehanna’s translation was intended to aid al-Qaeda, by inspiring readers to pursue jihad themselves, and therefore constituted “material support” to a “terrorist organization.”

The prosecutor relied on a 2010 Supreme Court decision in a case I argued, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. In Humanitarian Law Project, a divided Court upheld the “material support” statute as applied to advocacy of peace and human rights, when done in coordination with and to aid a designated “terrorist organization.” (The plaintiffs in the case sought to encourage the Kurdistan Workers Party in Turkey to resolve their disputes with the Turkish government through lawful means, by training them in bringing human rights complaints before the United Nations and helping them in peace overtures to the Turkish government.) The Court ruled that the government could criminalize such advocacy of peaceful nonviolent activity without transgressing the First Amendment, because, it reasoned, any aid to a foreign terrorist organization might ultimately support illegal ends.

The Humanitarian Law Project decision is troubling enough, as I have previously explained. But Mehanna’s case goes still further. The government provided no evidence that Mehanna ever met or communicated with anyone from al-Qaeda. Nor did it demonstrate that the translation was sent to al-Qaeda. (It was posted by an online publisher, Al-Tibyan Publications, that has not been designated as a part of or a front for al-Qaeda.) It did not even claim that the “39 Ways” was written by al-Qaeda. The prosecution offered plenty of evidence that in Internet chat rooms Mehanna expressed admiration for the group’s ideology, and for Osama bin Laden in particular. But can one provide “material support” to a group with which one has never communicated?
The Supreme Court in Humanitarian Law Project emphasized, as had the United States government in defending the “material support” statute, that the law does not make it a crime to engage in “independent advocacy” in support of a designated organization’s cause. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts strongly implied that this limitation was constitutionally mandated:

The Court also finds it significant that Congress has been conscious of its own responsibility to consider how its actions may implicate constitutional concerns. Most importantly, Congress has avoided any restriction on independent advocacy, or indeed any activities not directed to, coordinated with, or controlled by foreign terrorist groups.

“Under the material-support statute,” the Court insisted, people “may say anything they wish on any topic.” But apparently not on “jihad.” The prosecutor in Mehanna’s case argued that the translation was motivated by Mehanna’s ideological support of jihadism, and of al-Qaeda in particular. But without coordination, and without delivery of the final product to al-Qaeda or any of its known affiliates, it looks like nothing more than “independent advocacy,” activity that the government said would not, and the Supreme Court implied could not, be punished.
Why should those of us who have no interest in reading “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad” care? For the same reason that we should care about the prosecution of a Klansman or an anarchist for their speech. History shows that free speech is fundamental to a robust democracy, and that if the government can punish expression because of its political content, it will use that power to go after its enemies. Today’s enemy may be anyone who shows sympathy with jihadism, but who knows who tomorrow’s enemy will be. You don’t need 39 ways to unravel democracy; giving the government the power to penalize the speech it detests will do it in one.

April 19, 2012, 3:15 p.m.

Just this one breath, just this one exhale

I was looking back over Lidless and I was rereading the parts where Rhriannon says, "Just this one breath, just this one exhale, just this one breath, just this one exhale... I want this, I love this, I'm happy." It is the very first lines of the play and the very last lines she says before she dies. In the beginning we are not just what we mean and where they come from. Later on in the play, we find out that Bashir teaches Rhiannon to tell this to herself when she is dealing with her asthma, the suffocating disease that ended her life. I think there could be an interesting correlation made here between Bashir and Rhiannon. We know that Rhiannon is the product of her mother's decision to rape her detainee at Gitmo. Bashir plausibly could have gone through other types of torture at Gitmo such as waterboarding. I say this because of the reference to the sound of ocean waves in the very beginning of the play after Rhiannon's line, "Just this one breath, just this one exhale..." Bashir could have told himself, "I want this, I love this, I 'm happy" as was being tortured, or water boarded, to physically make it through. I would argue that it saved him physically, but killed him mentally. (When his daughter comes to visit him, he told her that she had lost her dad back at Gitmo.) Bashir then passes his technique onto Rhiannon when he learns of her asthma. At the end of the play Rhiannon doesn't die mentally, but physically. Just as Bashir died mentally from torture at Gitmo, Rhiannon died physically from the torture of asthma.

Just food for thought and potential discussion. Let me know if I am way out there with this...

How To Chronicle a Tragedy...Appropriately.

After hearing Ana’s presentation, I became fascinated with the idea of an online memorial. I had never thought that something like this website could exist, but with the increase in technology, it makes total sense. What struck me most about the website is how personal it is; our neighbors and fellow Americans can share their stories with the rest of the world. Unlike other memorials, this website isn’t just names carved into a wall—it consists of real people telling real stories about their personal experiences with the tragedy.

I wanted to look a little more into the ways in which the website is monitored. Since it can be edited by nearly anybody, I was wondering what sort of guidelines the website offered and how much opportunity there was for somebody to add every aspect of their story. On the website’s Community Guidelines page, I found the following rules:

WHAT TO DO

Be accurate and honest.

We are most interested in what you personally experienced.

Be appropriate.

This event and subject matter demand a certain dignity. Given the intensity of the event, some strong language may be appropriate in certain stories. But consider that this site will be used by people of all ages.

Be respectful of fellow community members.

Many stories on this site come from people who lost someone on 9/11. Please treat other users politely and respectfully. 

WHAT NOT TO DO

Don’t lie.

Say what matters, and we are trusting you to be honest. Don’t edit videos or images in a misleading way.

Don’t rant.

9/11 is a contentious subject, and we encourage people to participate in online and offline conversations devoted to 9/11’s causes and ramifications. This particular site, however, is not designed to support such conversations.

Don’t troll of harass.

Even if you disagree with someone, abusive or threatening behavior will not be tolerated and will result in banning.

These were some of the more interesting guidelines, in my opinion. I was happy to see that the site was taking some amount of action in keeping the site a respectful place. However, I still wonder how monitored the site actually is. I wonder how easy it would be for somebody malicious to post something—and not just something, but something hateful.

I think that an online memorial is a great idea; it’s an easy way for people to share their feelings, and it gives people access to unlimited reflection on a tragedy. However, I question the morality behind the site; I could see somebody abusing the privilege to reach thousands or millions of people still in despair.

Additionally, I wanted to ask the class: do you think there are any difficulties with the guidelines provided? Do you think any should be removed? Added?

Muslims treated like Jews?

This video is very striking! I found it while doing some research on my special project, and would like to hear my classmates' opinions on this.
I think the comaprison is rather extreme and to a certain extend appropriate ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5uwjR8tQyY

Significance of the heartbeat

I am happy that as class we were able to read a play. Compared to the novels and other poems we have read in class, I realized the benefit the play out loud in class. Similar to a speech, the audience gets more out of the reading of the play if it is acted out or simply read aloud with other characters.

A dramatic portion of the play that I would like to focus some attention to is the idea of the subtle beats that are found throughout the play. An example would be in the first scene when Alice is degrading Bashir, in the second scene:

RHIANNON My gut. (Beat.) But my questions won’t work. If I want to understand someone, I need to dress like them, walk like them, talk like them. I need to  become them.

And in the third scene:

Bashir: I used to have Asthma

Rhiannon: (beat)  How’d you make it stop?

The beat can have many different meanings. It can be a signal to an audience about some type of foreshadowing. When there is important dialogue that beat occurs calling all audience members to pay attention.  It can also be a reminder of what it is to be human.

In the play as a torturer, Alice dehumanizes Bashir. She treats him like an object, an alien with no feelings. The beat in the play throughout the the dialogue the heart beat sound remind everyone we share humanity. The dignity of the human person is remembered through the heart beat.

I also think the heartbeat could be one individual person. For this reason I believe it the heartbeat of Rhiannon. She is the character that connects all the others through love. Obviously her parents love her, Riva loves her, and there is a special bond between her and Bashir. The heartbeat adds a dramatic effect to the play. An uncertain sound, an uneasy reminder, and a leveling medium.

Imagine: Invasion of Space by Male

After acting out the first scene of Lidless in class, I realized how graphic the actions and the dialogue truly are. I wanted to explore the dynamic of the Invasion of Space by Female act and explore the opposite: Invasion of Space by Male. First, before I dive into my whole spiel on double standards, I wanted to outline some of the more graphic parts. As you reread these parts of the play, switch the gender roles (and body parts) where necessary. Imagine a man saying these things to a woman. Then, after we can picture the flipside of this act, we can decide the morality—or lack thereof—behind the entire idea.

Here are some of the more graphic parts of the first scene:

ALICE   I’m touching myself. My fingers trail up my thigh as I think of all our bodies could do. I could sink onto your hard, hot cock. I could bury my face in your neck. You could hold me. You could move me. You could help me find light and redemption and peace.

And again:

ALICE   What’s the matter, Mo? Is the great Islamic sword too weary to rise today? (Beat.)Holy mother. Looks like I found your sweet spot. Right here. An inch beneath your left ear. Jesus. I could hang Old Glory on that pole. I’ve been wasting my time on white boys. It appears those rumors about Asian men are lies your ladies tell to keep you to themselves. Selfish bitches.

And again:

ALICE   Oh. I forgot to tell you, I’m bleeding, and there’s nothing shielding you from my twenty-five-year-old cunt, just red, red, red, staining skin already caked pus white and blue with bruises, making you the color of the flag I’ve sworn to protect.

Obviously, a gender reversal in for this scene seems absurd, disgusting, and beyond publication. If Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig had fictionalized the rape of a woman in this same manner, she may not have gotten the rights to publish it or the acknowledgement of her work. While that might seem extreme, the rape of women is a huge issue throughout the world today; however, the rape of men doesn’t seem so prevalent, so hearing something like this doesn’t seem so awful.

When I talked to some of my friends about this first scene, a lot of them seemed disbelieving. For them, they didn’t really understand how a woman can rape a man. They said, “If a man is not willing, then it won’t really work.” However, this type of mentality holds the same weight as the people who claim that certain women “ask for” rape by the way that they dress and their overall attitudes. This thinking perpetuates a double standard. If it doesn’t work for one gender, it shouldn’t be okay for the other.

Rape is a serious issue, and I think that, while Cowhig brings light to that, she does so in a very dangerous way. A simple imagining of role reversal borders on extremely inappropriate and offensive text. Do you guys agree or disagree?

Loss of Innocence in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I know it’s been about a week since we finished Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but I realized there was one major theme in the book that we didn’t spend too much time on. That theme was the loss of innocence, experienced by Oskar.
Throughout the novel, Oskar puts pictures in his book called “Things that happened to me”. The images in that scrapbook showed terrible horrendous things, both dealing with 9/11 (the falling man) and other things throughout his life (Hamlet, Stephen Hawking, etc.). Not only would it be terrible for a kid to compare himself to a tragic hero like Hamlet, but he also thinks about other sad and scary things throughout the day. A number of times in the novel Oskar points out things he knows, or things he knows but that he wishes he didn’t. Oskar is presented as a boy who knows a lot, especially things a boy his age shouldn’t know.
So this got me thinking about my own 9/11 experience and how it could’ve affected my innocence. In my case, however, I wasn’t as exposed to the violence and destruction of 9/11. At my school, we weren’t told about the attacks during the school day, even though we weren’t allowed to go outside for recess on that clear day. My parents didn’t explain much to me. Even though the TV was constantly tuned to the news channel, I didn’t pay much attention. My 9/11 education occurred much later than for Oskar. Do you think this was the right way to handle the situation, instead of being thrust into the grown-up world like Oskar? Is this how 9/11 was handled for you? What’re your thoughts on the subject, if you were a little older than I was at the time?

Final Scenes

In the chapter “My Feelings”, Oskar’s grandma mentions frequently a dream she had the preceding night. In that dream, events from her life and history happened in reverse.  Eve put an apple back on the tree, collapsed roofs reformed, and tears ran up faces instead of down. Even as she was moving on from the past with Oskar’s grandfather, leaving the town and apartment she’d been stuck in for upwards of fifty years, she couldn’t help but recall that dream.
This is echoed in the next chapter when Oskar looks at his volume of Things That Happened to Me. He rearranges the pages so that the falling man falls upward. He thinks about the last night with his father, and how everything would’ve happened backward. He wanted to be safe with his father once again.
As I read these two passages, I thought about our discussions of mourning and melancholia. It seemed strange to me for two narrators to be thinking in this fashion. They both expressed a desire to want to go back to a time before the present. They wanted their tragedies to be erased. Even as Oskar’s grandma was working through her feelings in a letter, and Oskar had cried with his mother (both signs of mourning), they were reliving their tragedies. They seemed to be stuck in the past, even as they were showing some signs of progress. So, the question remains, where does melancholia end and  mourning begin for Oskar’s grandma, and especially Oskar himself?

Loyalty to the Dead

Since we began discussing grief both on the blog and in class, I have become completely fascinated with watching Oskar’s progress throughout his various processes of coping. Most interestingly, Oskar appears to feel a certain loyalty to his father that he feels frightened to break. As I read about his feelings regarding this loyalty—despite the fact that he never blatantly acknowledges it, he subtly includes hints and clues that lead the reader toward this mindset—, I began to wonder if Oskar still experiences sadness in regards to his father’s death or if he forces himself to feel sadness because he believes that he should.

A prime example of this appears in Heavier Boots, when Oskar straightforwardly questions his mother about her ability to laugh after the death of his father. After expressing how he misses his father, Oskar questions if his mother feels the same. When she says she does, he inquires, “But do you really?” and further states, “It’s just that you don’t act like you miss him very much.” Eventually, Oskar reveals that he came to this speculation because he “hear[s her] laughing…in the living room. With Ron.”

This discussion escalates. In response to Oskar’s questioning, his mother explains, “I’m trying to find ways to be happy. Laughing makes me happy.” Stubbornly, Oskar insists, “I’m not trying to find ways to be happy and I won’t,” and he eventually elaborates, “Dad would want me to remember him.” This scene ends with Oskar in a fit of rage, screaming to his mother, “If I could have chosen, I would have chosen you!”

Additionally, a scene with Dr. Fein reinforces Oskar’s desire to remain loyal to his dead father. Oskar recounts the conversation, starting with a question from Dr. Fein:

“Do you think any good can come from your father’s death?” “Do I think any good can come from my father’s death?” “Yes. Do you think any good can come from your father’s death?” I kicked over my chair, threw his papers across the floor, and hollered, “No! Of course not, you fucking asshole!”

Both of these excerpts show the loyalty that Oskar feels to his father and the absurdity he feels when someone presses him to break this loyalty. Since we have decided that it has been at least a year since the attacks, we can also conclude that Oskar has been grieving for quite some time. However, despite the lapse in time, Oskar remains held down by the obligation he feels to stay stuck on his father. Overall, such a scene suggests that Oskar only grieves as much as he does because he feels as if he should.

With that being said, I want to propose that Oskar truly is experiencing melancholia, as he has reached a total standstill in his grieving process and acts out when somebody suggests that he break his loyalty to the dead.

Additionally, I would like to ask anybody in the class who has experienced any part of the grieving process: have you ever felt this kind of loyalty to a loved one that you lost? What did it feel like if/when you broke that loyalty? Did you feel guilt? Freedom? 

Significance of the Elephant

I think that the elephant is an extremely important symbol in this book.  There are many similarities between the elephant and Oskar, such as having an incredibly strong memory creating an inability to forget.  They also both seemingly have the inability to cry.  Where elephants are suspected to be physically unable, Oskar simply chooses not to.

The elephant is first discussed by Oskar and Abby Black in the chapter The Only Animal.  Oskar sees a picture of an elephant's eye on Abby's apartment wall, and tells her that he loves it, but clarifies to the reader that he wasn't just saying this because he wanted her to like him.  I think he makes this clarification because he wants the reader to realize that he felt a real significant connection to the picture.

In a way, I think that Oskar can really relate to the elephant.  He explains that elephants have memories much stronger than humans, which I suspect is where the phrase "elephants never forget" comes from.  The theme of "never forget" not only applies to Oskar's struggles with his fathers passing, but also was and is the theme for the 9/11 memorial campaign.  When explaining that elephants have strong memories, Oskar talks about the scientist who is doing research on elephants by playing recorded "calls" from other elephants, to see how they react.  He talks about how the scientist would play the calls of a dead loved one, and the elephants would remember.  I thought that this was significant because of the way Oskar is so attached to the recordings left by his dead father.  I also found it important that Oskar could not remember how the elephants reacted.  In my mind this is because Oskar does not quite know how he is handling the passing of his father.

Although he doesn't remember how the elephants reacted, he knows that they didn't cry.  Oskar doesn't see real emotion as an option.  He would symbolize his emotions with phrases such as "heavy boots."  When Abby argues that the elephant is crying, Oskar dismisses it by saying that the photo was "manipulated in Photoshop", but he takes a photo of it just in case.  I think that this is representative of Oskar's inner battle, of whether or not he can show emotion.  He dismisses the idea that elephants can cry, because he wants not crying to seem justifiable, but he takes a picture of the crying elephant, because he wants crying to be an option for him in the future.

I think that Oskar feels that he and the elephant have a mutual understanding, and in a way, Oskar feels sympathy for the elephant.  Oskar knows what it is like to have the blessing of strong memory, but also the curse of not being able to forget.

How to Deal With Mourning

Grief is something everyone has to deal with at one point in their life. With the passing away of my Uncle last semester it is easily noticeable that it plays a role in other people in the family in different ways. It not only affects the entire family to some point but when is it a little too far or a little scary how hard it hits someone. There are several things that play a role on how an individual mourns. These will be listed in no particular order. First, it mostly depends on the type of personality one has. Another one is your gender. And a third one all depends on your age/role in the family. When one experiences death and mourns over a person’s death, there are mainly 3 types of mourning patterns. Instrumental mourners are people who speak about the grief they are feeling. Intuitive mourners are the ones who touch upon every bit of emotions that there is. These people are the ones that seem to be the most hit because they cannot hold back their emotions like other people. Another one is dissonant mourners. These people are most of the times the Dads in the family because they struggle with how they should handle it. They hold in their emotions and don’t know how to express it. They do this most of the time to seem strong. A lot of the times, this comes down to stereotypes that we set up for our society. The men hold in their emotions because it is said that real men don’t cry. There is so much on this website (http://www.griefhealing.com/column-different-grief-patterns.htm) that helps us see how others should handle with mourning. If the person is an adult or our person is a child like Oskar. This website states something that makes me feel as if it relates to Oskar on such an understanding of what he is trying to do. “Children and adolescents may be reluctant to express their thoughts and feelings verbally. Encourage them to express their grief and preserve their memories in a variety of ways, including art, music, journal writing, story-telling and picture collecting”. This is him trying to preserve his memory through the game he played with his dad and the key. It’s just something that takes their mind off of the troubles and burdens. Something that makes him relaxes.

Distracions

It seems to me that a common device for Oskar and Thomas in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is distraction. They are all trying to distract themselves from the harsh realities they are facing. Oskar tries to distract himself from the fact that his dad died with his mission of finding the lock to the key he has. It almost seems as if he is using random facts and leads to find this key (ie. Finding people whose last names' are Black merely because it said it on the letter.) One of the people that Oskar visited pointed out the semi-insanity of his mission. Oskar said:

"I found a key...and it was in an envelope with your name on it."
"Aaron Black?"
"No, just Black."
"It's a common name."
"I know."
"And a color."
"Obviously."

This just supports the fact that Oskar is just choosing to distract himself by going on a mission to find an imaginary lock that was related to his father. He also tries to make shallow relationships with the people he meets. This is shown in the scene when he has conversation and a cup of coffee with Abbey Black.

Somewhat similarly, Thomas cannot live his life normally ever since his girlfriend died. So when he met Oskar's grandma he could distract himself from the reality for a while. When they first met he described how originally she posed for him and he sculpted her as art. Eventually she caught on.

"He was sculpting me. He was trying to make me so he could fall in love with me."

Thomas wanted to fall in love so that he could be distracted. We are never really sure that it is ever a genuine love. They both get married and create a world of rules for themselves. It is rather insane-like. They seem distant from each other. Right before he decides to leave her we can see his shallowness. He says,

"I knew I was about to destroy what she'd been able to rebuild, but I had only one life to live."

Did he ever really love her or was she just merely another distraction and source of pleasure in his life?

Oskar's Freakout

In response to Mike's post, I thought it might be helpful to understand the five stages of grief. According to the Kubler-Ross model, introduced in the book "On Death and Dying," the five stages of grief are:

1. Denial--"I feel fine," or "This can't be happening"

2. Anger--"Why me?" or "It's not fair!"

3. Bargaining--"I'll do anything for a few more years!"

4. Depression--"I'm so sad" or "Why bother with anything?"

5. Acceptance--"It's going to be okay."

While we're still watching the story unfold, I think we can gather a lot of information about the characters from this model. I think, most importantly, we can understand a lot about Oskar by measuring his progress throughout these stages.

I recently read one of my favorite scenes in the book, one which, in my opinion, exemplifies Oskar's progress in his stages of grief. The scene comes from the chapter, "Heavier Boots," when Oskar recounts a scene he imagines happening during his play. The excerpt reads:

[I pull the skull off my head. Even though it's made of papier-mache it's really hard. I smash it against JIMMY SNYDER's head, and I smash it again. He falls to the ground, because he is unconscious, and I can't believe how strong I actually am. I smash his head again with all my force and blood starts to come out of his nose and ears. But I still don't feel any sympathy for him. I want him to bleed, because he deserves it. And nothing else makes any sense. DAD doesn't make sense. MOM doesn't make sense. THE AUDIENCE doesn't make sense. The folding chairs and fog-machine fog don't make sense. Shakespeare doesn't make sense. The stars that I know are on the other side of the gym ceiling don't make sense. The only thing that makes any sense right then is my smashing JIMMY SNYDER's face. His blood. I knock a bunch of his teeth into his mouth, and I think they go down his throat. There is blood everywhere, covering everything. I keep smashing the skull against his skull, which is also RON's skull (for letting MOM get on with life) and MOM's skull (for getting on with life) and DAD's skull (for dying) and GRANDMA's skull (for embarrassing me so much) and DR. FEIN's skull (for asking me if any good could come out of DAD's death) and the skulls of everyone else I know. THE AUDIENCE is applauding, all of them, because I am making so much sense. They are giving me a standing ovation as I hit him again and again...]

The reason why I enjoy this scene so much is because I feel like the emotion seems very real. I don't feel like Oskar's feelings seem manufactured by a writer, but I do feel like his thoughts reflect the ideas of a grieving child.

With that being said, I think that Foer captures Oskar in a couple stages of grief. First, I feel like Oskar shows signs of still facing denial. The fact that he includes his father as an actor in the play says, to me, that he still considers him as an integral part of his life, with equal significance to someone living. Additionally, Oskar obviously faces anger in this stage, as he reacts very violently in response to nearly no provocation. He outlines his anger to the reader:he's mad at Ron, his mother, his father--most interestingly--, his grandmother, and his therapist. And for Oskar, all of his anger makes sense.

I'm curious to see Oskar's healing process unfold throughout the story; I want to observe closely to see if and how he follows the stages of grief.

Adrienne Rich 1929-2012 RIP

Poetry is Dr. Metres' metier, but I didn't want to let Adrienne Rich's passing go without comment.  If you don't know her work, spend a little time searching out her poems on the web.  Here is one that is worth pondering in relation to our class.

Personal Mourning

Since the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is being used in class to highlight the ways that people deal with personal grief, I thought it might be helpful to point out the ways various characters are grieving in the novel. The two most obvious grievers in the novel thus far are the two narrators of the first three chapters. The first narrator, Oskar, is dealing with his grief primarily by trying to hold onto his dad’s memory, but also in trying to replace him. Oskar mentions that he wanted to give the Morse code jewelry (which he ended up giving his mother) to the man at the French embassy, or a person in a wheelchair, among others. However, while Oskar tries to connect more with some people, he shies away from others. He doesn’t like Ron very much, for obvious reasons, but he also starts to lie to his mother in order to pursue his dad’s key.
The second narrator we have been introduced to, Thomas, is mourning the loss of Anna. While Oskar’s mourning brings him into contact with more and more people (the Blacks as well as the woman in the art supply shop), Thomas is “losing words”, and eventually comes to the point where he cannot speak. While Oskar is being more social, Thomas is shutting himself off from the world.
Those aren’t the only grievers in the novel, however. Oskar’s mom and grandma also mourn the loss of Oskar’s father in distinct ways. Oskar’s grandma seems to be clinging to Oskar more and more. In the limousine, for instance, she is becoming so attached that Oskar feels the need to climb in the front seat with the driver. Oskar’s mom, on the other hand, exhibits a bit of contradiction. On the one hand, she is shown squeezing her hands in the limousine, apparently out of anguish. On the other hand, she seems to be moving on at home, still playing board games and laughing and being around Ron, her “friend”. Although this is a bit of a simplification of the different ways of grieving in the novel, I hope its helpful as we learn more and more about these characters.

U.S. Moves to Ease Limits on Use of Data in Counterterror Analysis

U.S. Moves to Ease Limits on Use of Data in Counterterror Analysis

The Obama administration is moving to relax restrictions on how counterterrorism analysts may access, store and search information about Americans gathered by government agencies for purposes other than national security threats. 
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected on Thursday to sign new guidelines for the National Counterterrorism Center, which was created in 2004 to foster intelligence sharing and to serve as a clearinghouse for terrorism threats, according to officials. 
The guidelines will lengthen to five years — from 180 days — the center’s ability to retain private information about Americans when there is suspicion that they are tied to terrorism, intelligence officials said. The guidelines are also expected to result in the center making more copies of entire databases and “data-mining them” — using complex algorithms to search for patterns that could indicate a threat — than it currently does. 
Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/23/us/politics/us-moves-to-relax-some-restrictions-for-counterterrorism-analysis.html?emc=na

I think this little excerpt of news really says a lot and it definitely relates to what we've been talking about in class. Many people in class expressed fear about the government watching over them, well here you go I suppose. The government has extended the amount of time they can hold your private information when terrorism is suspected. They have eased these restrictions as well to aid in data mining, searching for threats in large data. However, I'm going to make the extremely contentious argument that I'd rather have the government doing these things rather than not searching for terrorists. If there is a slight chance that this data could help prevent a terrorist attack, then I think it's worth it, especially since I don't have anything to hide. In the technologically connected world we live in today it is naive to think that anything you do on the internet is private or safe anyway.