Let your self fade away
and the light inside joins the sun
and shines out like a beacon;
Innocence is gained, not lost.
Cry.
The waters of blood are moving;
The dirty become more clean
and become transparent in the washing
and the blood moves into the forest.
When religion and science meet,
the world gets turned inside out and
I want to move to New Zealand where
I am a child and
God is an electron.
He looked at us
Almost taunting
Took his head back
And laughed.
It roared through the hills
And canyons
Changing the water into ice.
We fled
Our hearts full of fear
For ourselves.
He chased us
Through the villages
We were pins
And he simply crushed
the haystacks.
The colors in the sky
Were green
Horrible
At some point one of us
(I’m not sure which one)
Stopped running.
He looked at him
And took his head back
And laughed.
It melted the sky
and hills
and canyons.
But we still fled
Minds filled with hate.
Our hearts full of fear.
Rain bullets
Shooting down to stone
Tearing the blossoms
Ripping off the petals.
They fall,
Weighted,
No longer dancing to spring.
The edges of his feathered crown
Were worn
As he road into battle
On a spotted horse.
His men yelled
And were excited by thoughts of war
And glory.
War it was.
Glory it was not.
And his feathered crown lay bloody on the grass.
Although Boccaccio’s “Ser Ciappelletto” portrays a man who sins up until his dying breath, it is also an early Renaissance Humanist commentary on life. As Ser Ciappelletto blasphemes the Church by lying to one of its holiest friars, Boccaccio is also making a critique of the Church’s validity. When Ciappelletto dies, he has convinced the friar of his completely (and falsely) sinless nature and attains sainthood on earth. Yet his ultimate fate is unknown. Boccaccio intentionally left Heavenly judgment out to make a point: what matters is the here and now because God and the afterlife are beyond human comprehension.
Boccaccio paints Ser Ciappelletto as a rather amusing fellow who torments the Church, the government, and his fellow Italians. Yet he does this all to amuse himself, not because he is inherently evil. “He would have been greatly embarrassed if one of his legal deeds… were found to be anything other than manifestly false; he would have drawn up as many false documents as were requested of him without any fee, and done it more willingly than one who was paid enormous amounts of money.” His final act in life is to lie the holy friar, convincing the man of God of his purity and piety. Ciappelletto lives a lier and a thief, and dies a Christian and a saint. Obviously the Church is no better judge of this man than anyone else.
In his final act of deception, Ser Ciappelletto solves the dilemma of his caretakers and creates a persona who will inspire people for years to come. Although the fate of his immortal soul is unknown, the legacy he leaves behind in life is the focus of his story. His present relationship with God is what matters, not what happens after his death. A real confession of Ciappelletto’s sins would just condemn him further, and also cause problems for the two brothers and the friar. But as Ciappelletto himself posed the solution, “I have, while alive, done so many injuries to our good Lord, that to do Him one last injury at my death won’t really matter.” His life is the method by which he defines his relationship with God. What happens after our time is unknown, and so it should not be our focus in living.
In life, Ser Ciappelletto sinned; in death, he becomes a saint. Yet just as his sainthood is purely an earthly construct, so too is the entire Church according to Boccaccio. The holy friar does not have any divine powers to discern Ser Ciappelletto’s true nature, and thus is able to be tricked into giving him the highest praise. This goes to show that the Church is fallible - it has no special ability to understand God, and therefore the nature of God is unknown. The only thing a person can be sure of is his lifetime on earth. In one short tale, Boccaccio redefines the human relationship with the Church and the afterlife in a purely Humanist perspective.
One murder is more human than a hundred deadly tsunamis, earthquakes, and eruptions. We find human nature in the individual, not the collective. Rousseau presents the idea of “total alienation of each associate… to the whole community.” These noble words pose an elegant solution to the problem of human society. If only, Rousseau proposes, each person was utterly selfless, the Social Contract would construct a stable and constructive society that would benefit all its citizen components. But human beings are not components, and nor are they selfless. If men were angels, you wouldn’t need government in the first place - society would be a natural utopia. Rashomon shows us a very different picture of our nature, at once more disturbing and more human. It presents humanity without apologies; people who are deeply selfish. It is the human mind that perceives a greater or more evil intent in even our own actions. Yet behind this facade of egotism lies the human heart, the source of love and compassion which may sometimes shine through. Rousseau rests all his arguments on this small jewel of human nature, while Rashomon demonstrates how rare and precious it really is.
There are four stories in Rashomon. The fourth is presumed to be the truth, but the other versions tell the same story - except that each person telling it is presented as the murderer. The bandit, Tajomaru, kills the husband, Takehiro, after challenging him to an honorable duel; the wife, Masako, kills her husband while deliriously begging him to stop looking at with disgust; Takehiro himself commits honorable suicide after having been betrayed by his own wife. Why would they blame themselves? They speak the truth as they see it. None of them believe they are innocent, and so confess their guilt. Yet their versions distort the actual events to place themselves at the center. They each play the tragic hero, led by events beyond their control to a point of no return - led to do the only honorable thing left to do. Kill Takehiro. The reality is that all of their selfish decisions culminate in Takehiro’s death. None of them are honorable; not one stands against Takehiro’s greed, Tajomaru’s lust, or Masako’s hatred. They are all so weak and so selfish that they delude even themselves into believing their angst.
The drives of the characters are not animal emotions, but a deep-seated self-centeredness arising from our own self-consciousness. We are more aware of ourselves than anything else, and so we are the center of our own world. Descartes brought this concept, “I think therefore I am,” into such sharp focus that the West has hardly been able to get beyond it for hundreds of years. Rousseau, at the forefront of Enlightenment thinking, sought to displace this self-centeredness and turn it into “group-centeredness.” But this idea, although it would make for a great society, would reduce us to the state of ants - a hive mind with no individual thought. And that is what makes us human. What makes being human any good at all? It is our ability to ultimately rise above this egocentric thought process. Without abdicating the self, we can embrace others. We can understand others as ourselves, drawing them inward - not giving up the self as Rousseau proposes, but expanding it. Walking away from Rashomon, we see the honest smile of the woodcutter taking home the abandoned baby. This is the rare strength of human nature that makes life powerful even in the midst of selfishness.
The Civil War was fought over the ideology of America. Two distinct cultures arose in the Antebellum, one in the North and one in the South. Northerners turned the idea of American independence into individual independence. Writers and artists trying to find a style unique to their country developed Transcendentalism, a philosophy that believed in the absolute authority of the Self. This led to a conflict with the South, which believed it acceptable to own slaves. Southerners had gone from tobacco farmers hoping to make a quick fortune to America’s equivalent of landed aristocrats. They wanted to revive the old ideas of Europe, and built a social structure that emphasized family and society. Unfortunately, the wealth of this upper class was earned by black slaves. Because of its questionable morality, southern slave-owners avoided the issue until northerners pressured them to abolish it. They had to defend themselves from the invading ideology, while northerners had to confront the institution that violated their beliefs. The conflict over slavery revealed the underlying problem of having two very different systems in one country. America could not have two identities. In its adolescence, the Civil War, Americans would fight and die to decide which role their country would play: old aristocracy, or land of independence.
Northern ideology comes from Transcendentalism, a refinement of the ideas that forged America. The first Europeans that came to America sought independence from their mother country, and in the Antebellum, northerners were seeking independence from European culture, as well. The philosophy that arose from this venture, Transcendentalism, put the individual above all authority. “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.” (Emerson) Transcendental writers, like Emerson and Thoreau, believed that society was bad for the individual, that “our life is frittered away by detail.” (Thoreau) This belief in the Self inspired people to see the wrongs of slavery, many calling for its immediate end in the South. “But is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice,” said Garrison. (Brinkley 336) He was surely inspired by Emerson’s words, “I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.” (Emerson) The ideals of individualism that inspired the American Revolution also fueled the maturation of those ideas, as manifested in Transcendentalism. Northern ideology called for the breaking of tradition, and the independence from society and slavery.
The South, on the other hand, idolized the image of aristocracy. They sought to create an upper class like that in Europe, “true aristocracies, long entrenched.” (Brinkley 301) They felt the most important things were society and family. This class of rich nobles originated from the early colonial farmers, who had built small plantations in the hopes of getting rich on tobacco. (Alsop) The dreams of wealth had been achieved by some, enough to establish a stable hierarchy headed by wealthy southern plantation owners and their families. However, instead of peasants working the fields, slaved provided most of the labor. Southerners avoided the issue because slaves were the basis for the rest of their lifestyle. They wanted to return to the days of chivalry and high society, but the cost was in human freedom.
Northern ideology would not accept slavery, and northerners wanted to put an end to it in the South. Slavery violated the ideals of independence northerners believed in. “Like other reformers, … [Transcendentalists] were calling for an unleashing of the individual human spirit…” (Brinkley 336) This meant freeing the slaves, and the complete abolition of the institution. “Abolitionist writings had been antagonizing white southerners for years,” (370) but writing was not enough to convince them of the evils of slavery and the need for emancipation. John Brown rallied black slaves and white supporters, killing white southerners in the Harpers Ferry raid. (Loewen 173) He was caught and hanged. “Remember Shields Green and Copeland, who followed noble John Brown, and fell as glorious martyrs for the cause of the slave.” (Douglass) Northerners believed in independence, and pressured the South to bend to its moral authority and abolish slavery.
The South, however, resisted all northern threats and defended slavery. At first southerners “harbored reservations about slavery. But by the mid-1830’s, a militant defense of the system was beginning to replace this ambivalence.” (Brinkley 370) Slave-owners were forced to deal with the issue of slavery on a moral basis instead of avoiding it. Under pressure, their arguments were hypocritical. They “secretly feared that their slaves might revolt, even as they assured abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery.” (Loewen 189) In their defensiveness, they put up a flawed argument, poorly defending slavery when they actually wanted to defend aristocracy. The important thing to them was the lifestyle slavery provided, not slavery itself, but southerners believed “that an assault on one hierarchical system (slavery) would open the way to an assault on another such system (the family).” (Brinkley 305) They defended their culture from pressure from the North by defending an institution which they hoped would also preserve their ideology.
The Civil War began when the South realized that their system was too different from the North’s for there to be a compromise. Slavery became the breaking point between the poles of America, the one point where the two ideologies could not avoid each other. Their Civil War was fought over the identity America was to have, for if it did not happen, the country would have two separate ideologies guiding its behavior. This crisis of ego-identity versus role-confusion identifies it as America’s adolescence in Erickson’s theory of self development. The Civil War was not a conflict over slavery, but over the role of the country. Slavery was the issue that had to be resolved in order to determine America’s ideology, where before there had been two distinct ideologies. The North, with Transcendentalism, wanted individualism and freedom from all society and law. The South hoped to revive chivalry and high society, building an aristocracy of elite planters ruling over the lesser classes. Authority of the individual versus the authority of the hierarchy. Unity between the North and the South broke down as their ideologies matured and they became more willing to fight for those ideals. The realization of those differences, in the form of conflict over slavery, led to the Civil War. It was fought over which identity America would have: northern Transcendentalism or southern aristocracy.
Alsop, George. Tobacco and Trade in Maryland. 1666.
Alan. The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People. Boston, Massachusetts: McGraw-Hill, 1993.
Douglass, Frederick. Men of Color, To Arms! 21 March 1863.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “A Nonconformist.” Self-Reliance. 1841.
Loewen, James. Lies My Teacher Told Me. New York: Touchstone, 1995.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854.
Confucianism may be able to be realized in today’s society, but not without abandoning our entire political system. There is nothing innately wrong with Confucius’ teachings; he describes the perfect model for humanity, not a realistic one. But the United States isn’t just flawed; the traits of our government are those which Confucius singles out as the worst traits to have. If Chun Tzu is the ideal of society, then the United States is its antithesis.Confucius says, “The superior man understands righteousness; the inferior man understands profit.”
A leader ruling by Te (moral example) must show people the way of good through his own actions. “In whatever direction the wind blows, the grass always bends.” In the case of our own government, however, the leaders rule with money. Politicians can start and squelch laws and programs by regulating their funding. In turn, citizens have learned to settle disputes by suing one another. The winner is awarded money, and the loser loses money. The entire political system is run by currency - our leaders are budget managers, and we follow their lead by caring only for profit.
Confucius says that leading by punishment will create citizens who “avoid wrongdoing but will have no sense of honor and shame.” The United States government runs on this system, and its citizens do indeed have no sense of Li, propriety. For example, people don’t see speeding itself as wrong, and the only thing stopping them from speeding is the fear of getting caught. What is the punishment for getting caught? You guessed it - a monetary fine. People should do what is right without reward and stop themselves from doing what is wrong. However, in the current system, with laws specifically stating what is wrong, people see everything unstated as good, and learn only to avoid the law. The only way to control such unruly citizens is to create new laws and more severe punishments. In order to break this cycle, the government must “lead them with virtue and regulate them by the rules of propriety, and they will have a sense of shame and, moreover, set themselves right.”
Confucius says that a good government has “sufficient food, sufficient armament, and sufficient confidence in the people.” When forced to give these things up, the last to go would be confidence, and the first to go would be armament. Our government would only let go of armament as a last resort, and confidence has already been sacrificed. How else can one explain standardized testing? It must represent a lack of confidence in our teachers and students. Courts regulate even minor disputes between people. Doesn’t this show lack of confidence in people’s responsibility? Armament and confidence get mixed up with the Homeland Security Act, which improves defense at the expense of trusting people. Big Brother may keep us safe, but why should we trust our leaders when they don’t trust us?
Our government, our entire political system, is run by money and punishment. It leads to a society verging on the anarchy of Confucius’ own time. He had to imagine an ideal society even at a time when his own society was in chaos. If the United States government matches his worst examples, fits the antithesis of Chun Tzu, then we are indeed close to the same cultural abyss. However, no matter how close to anarchy we actually are, we can still attain true Confucianism. China survived a collapse of order and went on to become a strong empire. Perhaps if we follow Confucius’ examples, we can shape and change our own society so that it can reach Chun Tzu.
The 1920’s should be called the Dreaming Decade. Everyone in America was dreaming of a better future, more freedom, or a safer community. Women had won the vote and now turned to overthrowing old traditions. Blacks migrated north to the promises of a better life. There were also those dreaming of a return to tradition. The Ku Klux Klan and fundamentalists promoted racial purity and stronger faith. President Hoover stated his dream, shared by many Americans during the Roaring 20’s, when he said, “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” (Zinn 378) Everybody and their dog had a dream, and these dreams were what shaped the country and the world. Things would get better, progress would be made. The Dreaming Decade was full of optimism.
Women began dreaming of independence. In the first year of the new decade, they secured the right to vote. They proceeded to invade the work-place and college campuses. A new type of woman emerged that represented a departure from all previous stereotypes, who felt it “no longer necessary to maintain a rigid, Victorian female ‘respectability.’ They could smoke, drink, dance, wear seductive clothes and makeup, and attend lively parties.” (Brinkley 667) These women were called flappers. They were at the extreme, but their endeavors to become better than their parents’ generation reflected the attitude of many young women of the age.
Marketers were quick to latch onto the dreams of the New Woman. Marlboro began targeting cigarette ads to women. Cosmetics and beauty products, unpopular with the flappers’ mothers, became essential. During this period when women were looking for a new image, products were helping to define it. Advertisements played on women’s new insecurities with their bodies, their beauty, and their age. Women were dependent on media images to define how they should look and behave. The dream of women’s independence failed as its very image became dependent on marketing.
African-Americans also dreamed of freedom and independence from the old ways. Chicago and other northern cities promised to fulfill that dream by offering jobs and a tolerant atmosphere. Most blacks lived in the South as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. When the boll weevil ravaged the cotton crops, they were left with lower wages and unemployment. With the rise of the new Ku Klux Klan, lynchings became more frequent. “Every time a lynching takes place in a community down south… you can depend on it that colored people will arrive within two weeks.” (Tuttle 4) Even when black people weren’t being killed, they were being abused, segregated, and forced to live in poor conditions. “I suppose the worst place there is better than the best place here.” (2) The dreams of the North where the beginnings of the Great Migration.
The North held many promises for black people, but Chicago wasn’t always as great as it was made out to be. “Their aspirations for economic, political, and social rebirth were soon shattered by their reception in the city.” (Tuttle 5) The South was not the only place of prejudice. The high concentration of immigrants in the North made it a prime target of the Klan, where many resented the influx of foreigners that took away jobs. Blacks were now foreigners, migrants working along with the immigrants in hard, low-paying jobs. Unions like the AFL “often worked actively to exclude blacks… Most blacks, however, worked in jobs in which the AFL took no interest in at all - as janitors, dishwashers, garbage collectors, domestics, and other service capacities.” (Brinkley 661) Blacks in America had gone from slavery to sharecropping to service-workers. Their dreams of improvement and freedom went unfulfilled, ever after the Great Migration.
The Ku Klux Klan had dreams, too. They wanted racial purity, an America free from black people. The very aspirations of blacks helped fuel the Klan’s rebirth in the twenties, but “fear of the ‘New Negro’ rapidly declined as he either accepted his old place or moved to northern cities.” (Higham 5) This time around, however, the Klan had expanded their dream of “Native, white, Protestant supremacy.” (Colin 1) Jews, Catholics, and foreigners were terrorized. The Klan became widely popular, supported by many that believed that immigrants “undermined the whole economic system.” (Higham 2)
Fortunately or unfortunately, the KKK’s dream was doomed from the start. There were far too many immigrants to lynch or return them all. They had lived in America, some for generations, and had become Americans. “Anti-Klan mobs were beginning to lash back at the organization in areas where immigrants were strongly entrenched.” (Higham 6) There were more people who the Klan worked against than it worked for, and even some of those disagreed with its ways. Everyone had dreams of their own, but the Klan’s dream worked against many other people’s. “Explicitly, racism denied the regnant optimism of the Progressive era.” (Higham 3) Scandals involving high-ranking Klansmen caused distrust in the organization that had been founded on so-called moral principals, and finally led to its downfall. The racial purity they dreamed about was not to be.
Prohibition was another movement that represented the dream to return to tradition. It banned the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages in 1920. Alcohol was associated with drunken violence, especially toward women and children in the home. It was also connected to immigrants, to which alcohol was part of everyday life. Many “Drys” were the same sort that supported the Ku Klux Klan, “fundamentalists: provincial, largely… rural men and women fighting to preserve traditional faith and to maintain the centrality of religion in American life.” (Brinkley 673) Prohibition was accompanied by other fundamentalist movements, such as banning the teaching of evolution in schools. The goal of these movements was to promote the dream of a traditional nation.
One of the famous trademarks of the twenties was the violation of Prohibition. Banning alcohol actually caused more problems than it solved. “Since an enormous, lucrative industry was now barred to legitimate businessmen, organized-crime figures took it over.” (Brinkley 671) Gangs used profits to move into prostitution, gambling, and drugs. Prohibition increased alcohol-related violence instead of preventing it. Gangs competed for the control of bootlegging, resulting in 500 deaths in Chicago alone. The drinks themselves were more dangerous - homemade alcohol could cause blindness and death. Still, the demand for it went unabated. Even the police could be bought off by bootleggers. The fundamentalists lost ground in their push for Creationist teachings, as well. The Scopes trial in 1925 revealed them to be narrow-minded and their position anti-progress. The dream of bringing back old traditions and preventing the harm alcohol could bring was crushed by the negative response to Prohibition.
The dreams could not mask reality. Most dreams were never to come true. This was the dual identity of the Dreaming Decade. There were wonderful dreams, but they sowed the seeds for their own destruction. Women sought to create a new image, and found it not in themselves, but in the products sold to them. Black Americans went north to escape the clinging bonds of slavery, but found new shackles, this time in the unfamiliar streets of Chicago. The Ku Klux Klan, whose dream was obviously a horrible nightmare for many, failed nonetheless. Prohibition’s more noble goal ended up causing the problems it tried to fix. Even Hoover’s dream of ending poverty was ridiculous when “the top 0.5 percent of Americans in 1929 owned 32.4 percent of all the net worth of individuals.” (McElvaine 3) The dreams of a nation lay broken at the end of the Dreaming Decade. Perhaps the Great Depression affected people’s spirits so greatly because they had much more than money invested in the failed dreams. The 1920’s were full of hope but devoid of solutions. A fitful and universal name for those years would be the Dreaming Decade - the era of dreams.
Brinkley, Alan. The Unfinished Nation. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1993.
Gordon, Colin. “The Ku Klux Klan Defines Americanism.” Major Problems in American History, 1920-1945. Houghton Mifflin, 1926.
Higham, John. “The Tribal Twenties.” Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism. New Jersey: Trustees of Rutgers College, 1955.
McElvaine, Robert S. “Who Was Roaring in the Twenties? - Origins of the Great Depression.” The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941. New York: Times Books, 1984.
Tuttle, William M., Jr. “Going into Canaan.” Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. New York: Atheneum, 1970.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial, 1980.