Unit 12 - Blog Query - Conejo

Cunejo was always a realist. The unwanted child of a rape victim, he had always hd to fend for himself.

He was touched by the kindness of Dr. Fuentes, and desire of the deserter to help people – and he followed in the deserter’s steps, learning from him and helping the people of Cerca de Cielo.

(The dollars taken from Dr. Fuentes wallet helped keep them in medical supplies for many years to come, and they were able to sell the car, too.)

Dr. Fuentes’ legacy was finally realized, after all – with a second and third generation of healers in the countryside. And Conejo finally had a home where he was wanted.

(A more realistic biography would probably suggest that he was killed a year later by soldiers who finally found the city on the mountain top…)

Unit 11 - Blog Query Gabi - after the fall...

Gabi was born in 1980, to a mother who was later executed by the government of Argentina. Her father had been killed the year before. Both of the parents were relatively innocent of any crime, but made the mistake of having leftist political beliefs at the wrong time in Agentina’s history.

Gabi’s adoptive father, Roberto, through ties to the government, was able to adopt Gabi with a minimum of fuss. His wife Alicia, had tried unsuccessfully, for years, to have a child.

Around the time of Gabi’s fifth birthday, there was a great movement underway in Argentina, to discover what had happened to the thousands who had disappeared, and the infants born to women while in prison. Alicia eventually discovered one of Gabi’s birth grandparents. After a family rift, Alicia went to live with her husband’s parents, who helped her raise Gabi in keeping with their more down-to-earth values. Her father, Roberto, lwho ost his business and was disgraced -- killed himself.

Gabi, surrounded by a loving and supportive family (including an extended family from her birth parents) sailed through the teenage years, graduated from high school, attended college, and like her mother, became a teacher. And, like her mother, Gabi learned to not believe what she was told.

Bloq Query 10 - A Dry White Season

Blog: ... If you did not write on that subject, briefly summarize a scene from the novel that you think should have been included in the film and justify your reasons for choosing it

I'd suggest a full-scale reenactment, as an opening scene, of Ben's story, to Stanley, of the time in his childhood, when he and his father drove their sheep to better grazing lands. It was a time of severe drought, and they knew the sheep would die if they stayed in the home area. (In the movie we only see the discussion begun, when Ben says he didn't wear shoes until he was 14, and worked with sheep.)

His summary of the experience, later (page 163) explains much of the book and how he has come, through his experience is his search for justice, to understand just where he is:

"The single memory that has been with me all day...is that distant summer when Pa and I were left with the sheep. The drought that took everything from us, leaving us alone and scorched among the white skeletons.

What had happened before that drought has never been particularly vivid or significant to me: that was where I first discovered myself and the world. And it seems to me I'm finding myself on the edge of yet another dry white season, pehraps worse the one I knew as a child."

It was worse. Much worse. And more than innocent lambs were put to death.

Unit 8 - Blog Query - We wish to inform you...

First, I can't speak highly enough about the quality of Gourevitch's prose. He's a superb writer. I started flagging the phrases and insights that he had with little tags, and the book began to look like a battlefield!

"Genocide, after all, is an exercize in community building. A vigorous totalitarian order requires that the people be invested in the leader's scheme, and while genocide may be the most perverse and ambitious means to an end, it is also the most comprehensive."

"Killing Tutsis ws a political tradition in postcolonial Rwanda; it brought people together."

I'm sure those comments were, in part, written sardonically -- but there was enough truth underlying them to make them obviously true.

My reaction was one of disgust -- not just for a society so easily manipulated to behave like this, but in the responses of the Western World or, more correctly, the lack of response.

The international aid agencies, too, it seems to me, were like EMTs intent on patching up victims, that they had no interest in preventing further bloodshed or drawing attention to the situation. (The book makes it clear that there was profit to be made from large international efforts, if not by the organizations themselves, then by their major suppliers.)

France and Belgium come out looking particularly crass. The US looks bad for having turned its back on the situation.

That said, I don't know that any country, or group of countries, can or will invest great amounts of money in trying to be policemen to the world. My heart says countries should, but my head says we can't and shouldn't.

I do think that globalization and the profits it offers will cause things to continue as they area -- in a neo-neo-colonization world order. Sad.

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Changes to the movie? Show that neighbors attacked neighbors, and family members killed family members, if one happened to be Tutsi and the other Hutu. (The Tutsis were mostly vicitms, but we see that its isn't over.) The movie made it look as though most of the attrocities were by uniformed members of the Hutu army or militia. It was also everyday Hutus, neighbors and family people!!

Unit 6 - Blog Query - Three scenes from Zinat

Blog: Analyze at least three different specific scenes that you found particularly important or revealing. Why are they significant and what do they reveal? Were there any aspects of those scenes or the film as a whole that you found confusing or unclear? If you had to rewrite the ending, and in particular the role of Zinat’s husband, how might you change it?

1. The early scene, in the clinic, where Zinat is intimidated into serving the man ahead of the women who came before him. Doing it is arguably 1) required, because he is a man, but 2) an unchaste behavior, as she must give him an injection, perhaps in the buttocks. The women in the waiting room, which includes her future mother-in-law are either disgusted or titillated. The future mother-in-law leaves in anger.
   
2. The scene where the son tells his mother, against her obvious will, that if she wants him married, and every good Iranian mother wants her son married -- it is Zinat or nobody. I think that is a much more POWERFUL act on his part than most watching understand. He has more spine than is obvious and is willing, at least in part, to turn against tradition.
   
3. The scene where the government official comes to Zinat’s house to try to force her father into allowing her to work. Her father is so adamant in his resistance that he calls the official’s bluff and tells him to take him to jail. He says he will repay the government. Having a “proper” married daughter is very important in thatulture. He even later beats her in his frustration, wanting so badly for her to be a happy married woman in the traditional model. (You get the sense that he might even, like the US Army Did with the city of Hue in the Vietnam War), destroy Zinat to save her.)

I would NOT change the role of Zinat’s husband. He was a good man struggling with his own concepts of propriety and right and wrong, and it played out beautifully – with him joining Zinat at the end, turning his back on his mother and tradition.

Unit 5 - Blog Query (2) - France and the US in Vietnam

Blog (2): Based on your viewing of the film and the Unit 5 online lecture material, how would you compare or contrast the French and American experiences in Vientam?

Absolutely and fundamentally different.

The French were in Indochina to sustain, as the British did, a business venture that seemed quite attractive. It was not a battle against what was considered an “evil” form of social organization or government. The French weren’t there to spread Western Enlightenment (although that argument was made, as an afterthought.)

The US was there for different reasons. It did not commit hundreds of thousands of US troops to the area to save South Vietnam from the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese, it was there because it greatly feared the spread of International Communism, and felt that South Vietnam was the next domino (as in”domino theory,” to fall.) Like the words we hear today – fight terrorism there, today, or fight it tomorrow in our back yard, we were intent upon looking after our own interests over there.

As it turns out the domino theory didn’t become reality, Communism spread and, in effect, petered out. China is still a Communist Nation, the Soviet Union dissolved into a bunch of countries with different forms of government, including Russia. Even Cuba is likely to slowly become something other than a Communist nation over the next decade or two.

In the meantime, the US (and some of its allies) went on to lose almost 60,000 men and women in the war, suffer hundreds of thousands of wounded, killed untold hundreds of thousands of North and South Vietnamese, wasted the North and South with bombing and defoliants and Agent Orange, and it was probably all for nothing.

We may be doing much the same in the Middle East, today, in Iraq. Afghanistan might be a bit different, but that remains to be seen, too. Islamic Fundamentalism may have replaced the Red Menace, but we always seem to have a "World Class" enemy to fight...

Unit 4 - Blog Query - A Child at Tiananmen

Because my mother was also a sent-down girl , like Xiu Xiu, and badly affected by the experience of going to the countryside, and because my mother has told me, time and again, that the government will do things that don’t always make sense to the people, I would be wary of pushing too hard against the Communist Party.

My mother was hardened by her experience, and lost some of her idealism. This loss has been communicated to me – and she has taught me how to hide my true feelings, but to keep the flame burning in my heart.

I will NOT participate in the protests -- I am only 13 and my parents strictly limit my activities. (I am not free to roam, like many of the students demontrating there).

While my heart will be with the protesters, I believe my mother and father when they tell me that the Party will do whatever it must to retain control of the people -- and that can not be good for the people protesting in the Square.