Xem mẫu
- 580 PART FIVE - ADDITIONAL READINGS
you go across to the Glee Club now, because you’re going to work your
tails off here!”
I was soon under Miss Hurd’s spell. She did indeed teach us to put
7
out a newspaper, skills I honed during my next twenty-five years as a
journalist. Soon I asked the principal to transfer me to her English class
as well. There, she drilled us on grammar until I finally began to under-
stand the logic and structure of the English language. She assigned sto-
ries for us to read and discuss; not tales of heroes, like the Greek myths
I knew, but stories of underdogs—poor people, even immigrants, who
seemed ordinary until a crisis drove them to do something extraordi-
nary. She also introduced us to the literary wealth of Greece—giving me
a new perspective on my war-ravaged, impoverished homeland. I began
to be proud of my origins.
One day, after discussing how writers should write about what they
8
know, she assigned us to compose an essay from our own experience.
Fixing me with a stern look, she added, “Nick, I want you to write about
what happened to your family in Greece.” I had been trying to put those
painful memories behind me and left the assignment until the last mo-
ment. Then, on a warm spring afternoon, I sat in my room with a yellow
pad and pencil and stared out the window at the buds on the trees. I
wrote that the coming of spring always reminded me of the last time I
said goodbye to my mother on a green and gold day in 1948.
I kept writing, one line after another, telling how the Communist
9
guerrillas occupied our village, took our home and food, how my mother
started planning our escape when she learned that children were to be
sent to re-education camps behind the Iron Curtain, and how, at the last
moment, she couldn’t escape with us because the guerrillas sent her
with a group of women to thresh wheat in a distant village. She promised
she would try to get away on her own, she told me to be brave and hung
a silver cross around my neck, and then she kissed me. I watched the line
of women being led down into the ravine and up the other side, until they
disappeared around the bend—my mother a tiny brown figure at the end
who stopped for an instant to raise her hand in one last farewell.
I wrote about our nighttime escape down the mountain, across the
10
minefields, and into the lines of the Nationalist soldiers, who sent us to a
refugee camp. It was there that we learned of our mother’s execution. I
felt very lucky to have come to America, I concluded, but every year, the
coming of spring made me feel sad because it reminded me of the last
time I saw my mother.
I handed in the essay, hoping never to see it again, but Miss Hurd had
11
it published in the school paper. This mortified me at first, until I saw
that my classmates reacted with sympathy and tact to my family’s story.
Without telling me, Miss Hurd also submitted the essay to a contest
sponsored by the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge, and it won a
medal. The Worcester paper wrote about the award and quoted my essay
at length. My father, by then a “five-and-dime-store chef,” as the paper
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CHAPTER 26 - E XPOSITION: CAUSAL ANALYSIS
described him, was ecstatic with pride, and the Worcester Greek commu-
nity celebrated the honor to one of its own.
For the first time, I began to understand the power of the written
12
word. A secret ambition took root in me. One day, I vowed, I would go
back to Greece, find out the details of my mother’s death, and write
about her life, so her grandchildren would know of her courage. Perhaps
I would even track down the men who killed her and write of their
crimes. Fulfilling that ambition would take me thirty years.
Meanwhile, I followed the literary path that Miss Hurd had so force-
13
fully set me on. After junior high, I became the editor of my school
paper at Classical High School and got a part-time job at the Worcester
Telegram and Gazette. Although my father could only give me $50 and
encouragement toward a college education, I managed to finance four
years at Boston University with scholarships and part-time jobs in jour-
nalism. During my last year of college, an article I wrote about a friend
who had died in the Philippines—the first person to lose his life working
for the Peace Corps—led to my winning the Hearst Award for College
Journalism. And the plaque was given to me in the White House by Pres-
ident John F. Kennedy.
For a refugee who had never seen a motorized vehicle or indoor
14
plumbing until he was nine, this was an unimaginable honor. When the
Worcester paper ran a picture of me standing next to President Kennedy,
my father rushed out to buy a new suit in order to be properly dressed to
receive the congratulations of the Worcester Greeks. He clipped out the
photograph, had it laminated in plastic, and carried it in his breast
pocket for the rest of his life to show everyone he met. I found the much-
worn photo in his pocket on the day he died twenty years later.
In our isolated Greek village, my mother had bribed a cousin to teach
15
her to read, for girls were not supposed to attend school beyond a certain
age. She had always dreamed of her children receiving an education. She
couldn’t be there when I graduated from Boston University, but the per-
son who came with my father and shared our joy was my former teacher,
Marjorie Hurd. We celebrated not only my bachelor’s degree but also the
scholarships that paid my way to Columbia’s Graduate School of Journal-
ism. There, I met the woman who would eventually become my wife. At
our wedding and at the baptisms of our three children, Marjorie Hurd
was always there, dancing alongside the Greeks.
By then, she was Mrs. Rabidou, for she had married a widower when
16
she was in her early forties. That didn’t distract her from her vocation of
introducing young minds to English literature, however. She taught for a
total of forty-one years and continually would make a “project” of some
balky student in whom she spied a spark of potential. Often these were
students from the most troubled homes, yet she would alternately bully
and charm each one with her own special brand of tough love until the
spark caught fire. She retired in 1981 at the age of sixty-two but still
avidly follows the lives and careers of former students while overseeing
- 582 PART FIVE - ADDITIONAL READINGS
her adult stepchildren and driving her husband on camping trips to New
Hampshire.
Miss Hurd was one of the first to call me on December 10, 1987, when
17
President Reagan, in his television address after the summit meeting
with Gorbachev, told the nation that Eleni Gatzoyiannis’s dying cry, “My
children!” had helped inspire him to seek an arms agreement “for all the
children of the world.”
“I can’t imagine a better monument for your mother,” Miss Hurd said
18
with an uncharacteristic catch in her voice.
Although a bad hip makes it impossible for her to join in the Greek
19
dancing, Marjorie Hurd Rabidou is still an honored and enthusiastic
guest at all our family celebrations, including my fiftieth birthday picnic
last summer, where the shish kebab was cooked on spits, clarinets and
bouzoukis wailed, and costumed dancers led the guests in a serpentine
line around our Colonial farmhouse, only twenty minutes from my first
home in Worcester.
My sisters and I felt an aching void because my father was not there
20
to lead the line, balancing a glass of wine on his head while he danced,
the way he did at every celebration during his ninety-two years. But Miss
Hurd was there, surveying the scene with quiet satisfaction. Although
my parents are gone, her presence was a consolation, because I owe her
so much.
This is truly the land of opportunity, and I would have enjoyed its
21
bounty even if I hadn’t walked into Miss Hurd’s classroom in 1953. But
she was the one who directed my grief and pain into writing, and if it
weren’t for her I wouldn’t have become an investigative reporter and for-
eign correspondent, recorded the story of my mother’s life and death in
Eleni and now my father’s story in A Place for Us, which is also a testa-
ment to the country that took us in. She was the catalyst that sent me
into journalism and indirectly caused all the good things that came after.
But Miss Hurd would probably deny this emphatically.
A few years ago, I answered the telephone and heard my former
22
teacher’s voice telling me, in that won’t-take-no-for-an-answer tone of
hers, that she had decided I was to write and deliver the eulogy at her
funeral. I agreed (she didn’t leave me any choice), but that’s one assign-
ment I never want to do. I hope, Miss Hurd, that you’ll accept this re-
membrance instead.
- Chapter 27
Argumentation
PRO/CON ARGUMENT:
THE EXTENDED SCHOOL YEAR
U.S. Kids Need More School Time
Ellen Goodman
Ellen Goodman has written for Newsweek, the Detroit Free Press, and The Boston Globe.
Her popular newspaper column, “At Large,” has been syndicated since 1976; in 1980 she
won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. Her essays have been collected in
Close to Home (1979), At Large (1980), Keeping in Touch (1985), Making Sense (1989),
and Value Judgments (1993). Her most recent book is I K now Just What You Mean: The
Power of Friendship in Women’s Lives (2000). The following essay was published in 1988.
The kids are hanging out. I pass small bands of once-and-future stu-
1
dents, on my way to work these mornings. They have become a familiar part
of the summer landscape.
These kids are not old enough for jobs. Nor are they rich enough for
2
camp. They are school children without school. The calendar called the
school year ran out on them a few weeks ago. Once supervised by teach-
ers and principals, they now appear to be in “self care.” Like others who
fall through the cracks of their parents’ makeshift plans—a week with
relatives, a day at the playground—they hang out.
Passing them is like passing through a time zone. For much of our his-
3
tory, after all, Americans framed the school year around the needs of work
and family. In 19th century cities, schools were open seven or eight hours
a day, 11 months a year. In rural America, the year was arranged around
the growing season. Now, only 3 percent of families follow the agricul-
tural model, but nearly all schools are scheduled as if our children went
home early to milk cows and took months off to work the crops. Now,
three-quarters of the mothers of school-age children work, but the cal-
endar is written as if they were home waiting for the school bus.
The six-hour day, the 180 -day school year is regarded as somehow
4
sacrosanct. But when parents work an eight-hour day and a 240 -day year,
- 584 PART FIVE - ADDITIONAL READINGS
it means something different. It means that many kids go home to empty
houses. It means that, in the summer, they hang out.
“We have a huge mismatch between the school calendar and the real-
5
ities of family life,” says Dr. Ernest Boyer, head of the Carnegie Founda-
tion for the Advancement of Teaching.
Dr. Boyer is one of many who believe that a radical revision of the
6
school calendar is inevitable. “School, whether we like it or not, is custo-
dial and educational. It always has been.”
His is not a popular idea. Schools are routinely burdened with the
7
job of solving all our social problems. Can they be asked now to syn-
chronize our work and family lives?
It may be easier to promote a longer school year on its educational
8
merits and, indeed, the educational case is compelling. Despite the com-
plaints and studies about our kids’ lack of learning, the United States
still has a shorter school year than any industrial nation. In most of
Europe, the school year is 220 days. In Japan, it is 240 days long. While
classroom time alone doesn’t produce a well-educated child, learning
takes time and more learning takes more time. The long summers of for-
getting take a toll.
The opposition to a longer school year comes from families that want
9
to and can provide other experiences for their children. It comes from
teachers. It comes from tradition. And surely from kids. But the crux of
the conflict has been over money.
But we can, as Boyer suggests, begin to turn the hands of the school
10
clock forward. The first step is to extend an optional after-school pro-
gram of education and recreation to every district. The second step is a
summer program with its own staff, paid for by fees for those who can
pay and vouchers for those who can’t.
The third step will be the hardest: a true overhaul of the school year.
11
Once, school was carefully calibrated to arrange children’s schedules
around the edges of family needs. Now, working parents, especially
mothers, even teachers, try and blend their work lives around the edges
of the school day.
So it’s back to the future. Today there are too many school doors
12
locked and too many kids hanging out. It’s time to get our calendars
updated.
The School Year Needs to Be Better, Not Longer
Colman McCarthy
Colman McCarthy is a journalist, teacher, social activist, and columnist for The Wash-
ing Post. In 1982 he founded the Center for Teaching Peace, which teaches courses on
nonviolence. He is the author of Involvements: One Journalist’s Place in the World
(1984) and A ll of One Peace: Essays on Nonviolence (1994). His work as a volunteer
teacher in Maryland high school English classes influenced this essay, which first ap-
peared in The Washington Post in 1990.
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CHAPTER 27 - ARGUMENTATION
In eight years of teaching high school students in both private and
1
public schools, I’ve learned that on the subject of education their ideas
are often sounder and their opinions sharper than what’s coming from
the on-high experts and theorists. Two of them, in particular.
Thomas A. Shannon, director of the National School Boards Associa-
2
tion, is pushing for a 12-month academic year. No summer idleness, either
for students or school buildings. In Massachusetts, Michael Barrett, a
state senator, has introduced a bill to extend the school year from 180 to
220 days.
Both of these time-savers are fretting that compared with other
3
countries the United States is encouraging laziness and ignorance by its
short school year. Students in Japan, West Germany, South Korea, Israel
and Luxembourg all have a minimum of 210 calendar days of class. No
slackers there.
Longer Year Theory
Barrett, as if scratching his fingernails on the blackboard to make us
4
dolts understand, writes in the Atlantic:
“First, compared with their peers in Asian and European countries,
5
American students stand out for how little they work. Second, compared
with Asians and Europeans, American students stand out for how poorly
they do.” Barrett believes a school year of 220 days is an essential re-
form—“a superstructure under which other changes can be made.”
The unsuper arguments from Shannon and Barrett have been regu-
6
larly thrown into the education hopper since the late 1940s—and just as
regularly rejected. The longer-is-better theorists—Barrett spent a day
teaching seventh-graders, so his experiential knowledge is vast—are like
teachers who begin each class, “Let’s get started; we have a lot of
ground to cover.” This is the track coach method, substituting pages in a
book for yardage.
Teachers intent on covering ground won’t be any better at their craft
7
with 220 days than at 180. An inspired teacher can change a student’s
life—rouse the imagination, stir once-hidden powers of the intellect—in
a day, week or month. Extra teaching talent, not extra time, is needed.
Keep Students Enthusiastic
This theme ran through the papers I asked my students at Bethesda–
8
Chevy Chase High School to write. A young man offered this:
“The problem does not lie in the number of days students attend
9
class but in keeping students enthusiastic about learning. . . . Instead of
being followers of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, why doesn’t America
use its innovative spirit and reconstruct its educational program, not by
adding days but by adding stimulation to the classroom.”
On the issue that the young waste their time in June, July and August,
10
a senior woman wrote: “Nothing is like experiencing life firsthand by
spending a few months in nature, in another country, living with another
culture or working at an office or in Congress. I learned more about
- 586 PART FIVE - ADDITIONAL READINGS
myself this summer when I traveled with the circus than in four years of
high school.”
A third student asked: “If people are so concerned about education,
11
why don’t they increase the amount of money available for teacher
salaries? It is hard to attract good educators to teach when they earn lit-
tle money.”
More Funding
Students are right to resist the call for a longer academic year. They
12
know it means more time in custody, not just in class. The issue is more
money, not more schooling. With 70 percent of federal research-and-
development funds going into military programs and less than 2 percent
to education, the message is obvious: Soldiers are more valued than stu-
dents, weapons over wisdom.
Despite the generosity of a few corporations, private money to
13
schools is niggardly. Robert Reich reports in the winter 1991 issue of T he
American Prospect that corporate largess is seldom showered upon
public primary or secondary schools: “Of the $2.6 billion contributed to
education in 1989, only $156 million went to support the public schools
(about 6 percent); the rest went to colleges and universities (especially
the nation’s most prestigious, which the firms’ CEOs were likely to have
attended), and to private preparatory schools (ditto).” Public schools
received only 1.8 percent of all corporate donations.
Calls for a longer school year are like parents lengthening the time
14
for the family’s dinner. If there’s little or nothing to eat, why bother?
Schools are famished for money. I’ve never had a student who didn’t
know that.
A Scientist: “I Am the Enemy”
Ron Kline
Ron Kline is a pediatric oncologist and director of the bone marrow transplant program
at the University of Louisville. In 1989 Kline published the following essay, arguing the
necessity of animals in medical research experiments, in Newsweek magazine’s “My
Turn” section, a column of opinion written by readers of the magazine.
I am the enemy! One of those vilified, inhumane physician-scientists
1
involved in animal research. How strange, for I have never thought of
myself as an evil person. I became a pediatrician because of my love for
children and my desire to keep them healthy. During medical school and
residency, however, I saw many children die of leukemia, prematurity
and traumatic injury—circumstances against which medicine has made
tremendous progress, but still has far to go. More important, I also saw
children, alive and healthy, thanks to advances in medical science such
as infant respirators, potent antibiotics, new surgical techniques and the
- 587
CHAPTER 27 - ARGUMENTATION
entire field of organ transplantation. My desire to tip the scales in favor
of the healthy, happy children drew me to medical research.
My accusers claim that I inflict torture on animals for the sole pur-
2
pose of career advancement. My experiments supposedly have no rele-
vance to medicine and are easily replaced by computer simulation.
Meanwhile, an apathetic public barely watches, convinced that the issue
has no significance, and publicity-conscious politicians increasingly give
way to the demands of the activists.
We in medical research have also been unconscionably apathetic.
3
We have allowed the most extreme animal-rights protesters to seize the
initiative and frame the issue as one of “animal fraud.” We have been
complacent in our belief that a knowledgeable public would sense the im-
portance of animal research to the public health. Perhaps we have been
mistaken in not responding to the emotional tone of the argument cre-
ated by those sad posters of animals by waving equally sad posters of
children dying of leukemia or cystic fibrosis.
Much is made of the pain inflicted on these animals in the name of
4
medical science. The animal-rights activists contend that this is evidence
of our malevolent and sadistic nature. A more reasonable argument, how-
ever, can be advanced in our defense. Life is often cruel, both to animals
and human beings. Teenagers get thrown from the back of a pickup truck
and suffer severe head injuries. Toddlers, barely able to walk, find them-
selves at the bottom of a swimming pool while a parent checks the mail.
Physicians hoping to alleviate the pain and suffering these tragedies
cause have but three choices: create an animal model of the injury or
disease and use that model to understand the process and test new ther-
apies; experiment on human beings—some experiments will succeed,
most will fail—or finally, leave medical knowledge static, hoping that ac-
cidental discoveries will lead us to the advances.
Some animal-rights activists would suggest a fourth choice, claiming
5
that computer models can simulate animal experiments, thus making the
actual experiments unnecessary. Computers can simulate, reasonably
well, the effects of well-understood principles on complex systems, as in
the application of the laws of physics to airplane and automobile design.
However, when the principles themselves are in question, as is the case
with the complex biological systems under study, computer modeling
alone is of little value.
One of the terrifying effects of the effort to restrict the use of ani-
6
mals in medical research is that the impact will not be felt for years and
decades: drugs that might have been discovered will not be; surgical
techniques that might have been developed will not be, and fundamental
biological processes that might have been understood will remain mys-
teries. There is the danger that politically expedient solutions will be
found to placate a vocal minority, while the consequences of those deci-
sions will not be apparent until long after the decisions are made and the
decision makers forgotten.
- 588 PART FIVE - ADDITIONAL READINGS
Fortunately, most of us enjoy good health, and the trauma of watch-
7
ing one’s child die has become a rare experience. Yet our good fortune
should not make us unappreciative of the health we enjoy or the ad-
vances that make it possible. Vaccines, antibiotics, insulin and drugs to
treat heart disease, hypertension and stroke are all based on animal
research. Most complex surgical procedures, such as coronary-artery
by-pass and organ transplantation, are initially developed in animals.
Presently undergoing animal studies are techniques to insert genes in
humans in order to replace the defective ones found to be the cause of so
much disease. These studies will effectively end if animal research is se-
verely restricted.
In America today, death has become an event isolated from our daily
8
existence—out of the sight and thoughts of most of us. As a doctor who
has watched many children die, and their parents grieve, I am particu-
larly angered by people capable of so much compassion for a dog or a cat,
but with seemingly so little for a dying human being. These people seem
so insulated from the reality of human life and death and what it means.
Make no mistake, however: I am not advocating the needlessly cruel
9
treatment of animals. To the extent that the animal-rights movement has
made us more aware of the needs of these animals, and made us search
harder for suitable alternatives, they have made a significant contri-
bution. But if the more radical members of this movement are successful
in limiting further research, their efforts will bring about a tragedy that
will cost many lives. The real question is whether an apathetic majority
can be aroused to protect its future against a vocal, but misdirected,
minority.
Sack Athletic Scholarships
Allen Barra
Allen Barra is a sports columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a contributor to news-
papers and journals, such as The New York Times, t he Los Angeles Times, and A meri-
can Heritage. In addition to sports, Barra frequently writes about movies, books, history,
and popular culture. His books include Football by the Numbers (1986), That’s Not the
Way It Was (1995), and Inventing Wyatt Earp (1998). This essay originally appeared in
The New York Times in 1990.
“Of the making of reforms,” Confucius is said to have said, “there is
1
no end.” With regard to college sports, he might have added: Especially
when the reforms are half-hearted.
If the N.C.A.A. is serious about making reforms in college sports,
2
there’s one sweeping measure that is simple, fair and economically ad-
vantageous: Do away with athletic scholarships.
Scarcely a week goes by without news of some fresh scandal involv-
3
ing the football programs at our major schools. Steroids at Notre Dame.
- 589
CHAPTER 27 - ARGUMENTATION
Chaos at Oklahoma. The off-campus activities of the Miami Hurricanes
alone could have kept Don Johnson and the crew on “Miami Vice” busy
for another season. And how serious is the N.C.A.A. about solving these
problems?
The N.C.A.A.’s usual response, when it gets around to taking action,
4
is to punish thousands of students and student athletes by barring their
school’s team from TV and post-season competition. Of course students
and student athletes are easier to punish than coaches and administra-
tors; they have no rights.
In a recent issue of Sports Illustrated the writer Douglas Looney sug-
5
gested that a return to one-platoon football would cut the average school’s
athletic budget by nearly 25 percent, largely because the N.C.A.A.’s
current limit of 95 scholarships per year could be reduced to 69.
Why not go a step further? Since most of the schools that compete in
6
big-time football would lose money if not for TV, why not save everyone a
lot more money by eliminating athletic scholarships entirely?
Today’s college athletes are professionals in every significant way
7
except one: they don’t get paid. They are there not to learn but to make
money for the colleges. The money is a fact of life and can’t be done away
with so long as millions of alumni and fans are willing to pay for tickets
and turn on their TV’s. What’s to be done short of turning 18 -year-olds
into legitimate professionals?
For starters, colleges can get out of the business of being a cost-free
8
minor league for the National Basketball Association and National Foot-
ball League. The elimination of athletic scholarships would mean that
football and basketball players would be ill prepared for pro sports. But
why should that concern colleges?
Colleges would be forced to try something new: to field teams com-
9
prising college students, not future pro draft picks. There would be no
more preferential treatment for “scholar-athletes.” Nevertheless, more
athletes would graduate because they would be entering college as stu-
dents, not athletes.
Without athletic scholarships, we’d really find out if students from
10
Miami play football better than students from Notre Dame. More to the
point, we’d find out if Miami and Notre Dame, once their recruiting ma-
chines are gone, are really better than, say, Northwestern and Georgia
Tech.
The primary objections to this come, as you’d expect, from the
11
coaches and N.C.A.A. administrators. It would cut down on revenues,
they say. But why? Even if the networks paid less for a game played by
nonscholarship athletes, the schools would still earn big bucks; certainly
more than it would have cost them to field the teams. . . .
There may be nothing that can be done about the vast sums of
12
money N.C.A.A. sports are bringing in, but something can be done about
how it’s spent. Most colleges put most of their basketball and football
money back into their sports programs. Eliminate athletic scholarships
- 590 PART FIVE - ADDITIONAL READINGS
and the money saved could go toward putting minority students in
school. In this case, though, the minority students given aid would be
ones with aptitudes for math instead of 20 -foot jump shots.
Then, the millions brought in by college students would at least ben-
13
efit college students. Instead of sending thousands of uneducated ex-
jocks out to face a hostile society every year, colleges would have the
chance to send thousands of professionals into a society that needs them
badly.
- Chapter 28
Description
A Day at the Theme Park
W. Bruce Cameron
W. Bruce Cameron has written a weekly humor column for the Denver, Colorado, news-
paper the Rocky Mountain News since 1999 and also publishes his popular “Cameron
Column” on the Internet. As a father of three teenagers, Cameron often writes about the
challenges facing parents of adolescents, as illustrated by the following essay that first
appeared in the Rocky Mountain News in 1999. His first book, The 8 Simple Rules for
Dating My Teenage Daughter, was published in 2001.
One of the most endearing traits of children is their utter trust that
1
their parents will provide them with all of life’s necessities, meaning
food, shelter, and a weekend at a theme park.
A theme park is a sort of artificial vacation, a place where you can
2
enjoy all your favorite pastimes at once, such as motion sickness and heat
exhaustion. Adult tolerance for theme parks peaks at about an hour, which
is how long it takes to walk from the parking lot to the front gate. You
fork over an obscene amount of money to gain entrance to a theme park,
though it costs nothing to leave (which is odd, because you’d pay anything
to escape). The two main activities in a theme park are (a) standing in
line, and ( b) sweating. The sun reflects off the concrete with a fiendish
lack of mercy. You’re about to learn the boiling point of tennis shoes. Your
hair is sunburned, and when a small child in front of you gestures with her
hand she smacks you in the face with her cotton candy; now it feels like
your cheeks are covered with carnivorous sand.
The ride your children have selected for you is a corkscrewing,
3
stomach-compressing roller coaster built by the same folks who manu-
factured the baggage delivery system at DIA.* Apparently the theme of
this particular park is “Nausea.” You sit down and are strapped in so
tightly you can feel your shoulders grinding against your pelvis. Once the
* Denver International Airport
- 592 PART FIVE - ADDITIONAL READINGS
ride begins you are thrown about with such violence it reminds you of
your teenager’s driving. When the ride is over your children want to get
something to eat, but first the ride attendants have to pry your fingers
off the safety bar. “Open your eyes, please, sir,” they keep shouting. They
finally persuade you to let go, though it seems a bit discourteous of them
to have used pepper spray. Staggering, you follow your children to the
Hot Dog Palace for some breakfast.
Food at a theme park is so expensive it would be cheaper to just
4
eat your own money. Your son’s meal costs a day’s pay and consists of
items manufactured of corn syrup, which is sugar; sucrose, which is
sugar; fructose, which is sugar; and sugar, which is sugar. He also
consumes large quantities of what in dog food would be called “meat
byproducts.” When, after a couple of rides, he announces that he feels
like he is going to throw up, you’re very alarmed. Having seen his meal
once, you’re in no mood to see it again.
With the exception of that first pummeling, you manage to stay off
5
the rides all day, explaining to your children that it isn’t good for you
when your internal organs are forcibly rearranged. Now, though, they
coax you back in line, promising a ride that doesn’t twist, doesn’t hang
you upside down like a bat, doesn’t cause your brain to flop around in-
side your skull; it just goes up and then comes back down. That’s it, Dad,
no big deal. What they don’t tell you is HOW it comes back down. You’re
strapped into a seat and pulled gently up into acrophobia, the city falling
away from you. Okay, not so bad, and in the conversation you’re having
with God you explain that you’re thankful for the wonderful view but you
really would like to get down now.
And that’s just how you descend: NOW. Without warning, you plum-
6
met to the ground in an uncontrolled free fall. You must be moving faster
than the speed of sound because when you open your mouth, nothing
comes out. Your life passes before your eyes, and your one regret is that
you will not have an opportunity to punish your children for bringing
you to this hellish place. Brakes cut in and you slam to a stop. You
gingerly touch your face to confirm it has fallen off. “Wasn’t that fun,
Dad?” your kids ask. “Why are you kissing the ground?”
At the end of the day, you let your teenager drive home. (After the
7
theme park, you are impervious to fear.)
Hush, Timmy—This Is Like a Church
Kurt Anderson
Currently a columnist for The New Yorker, Kurt Anderson has been editor -in-chief of the
New York magazine, editor and cofounder of Spy magazine, and the architecture critic
for Time magazine. He has also written television and stage productions and the novel
Turn of the Century (1998). The article was originally published in Time in 1985.
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CHAPTER 28 - DESCRIPTION
The veteran and his wife had already stared hard at four particular
1
names. Now the couple walked slowly down the incline in front of the
wall, looking at rows of hundreds, thousands more, amazed at the roster
of the dead. “All the names,” she said quietly, sniffling in the early-spring
chill. “It’s unreal, how many names.” He said nothing. “You have to see it
to believe it,” she said.
Just so. In person, close up, the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial—two
2
skinny black granite triangles wedged onto a mound of Washington
sod—is some kind of sanctum, beautiful and terrible. “We didn’t plan
that,” says John Wheeler, chairman of the veterans’ group that raised the
money and built it. “I had a picture of seven-year-olds throwing a Frisbee
around on the grass in front. But it’s treated as a spiritual place.” When
Wheeler’s colleague Jan Scruggs decided there ought to be a monument,
he had only vague notions of what it might be like. “You don’t set out and
build a national shrine,” Scruggs says. “It becomes one.”
Washington is thick with monuments, several of them quite affecting.
3
But as the Viet Nam War was singular and strange, the dark, dreamy, re-
demptive memorial to its American veterans is like no other. “It’s more
solemn,” says National Park Service Ranger Sarah Page, who has also
worked at the memorials honoring Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson.
“People give it more respect.” Lately it has been the most visited monu-
ment in the capital: 2.3 million saw it in 1984, about 45,000 a week, but it
is currently drawing 100,000 a week. Where does it get its power—to con-
sole, and also to make people sob?
The men who set up the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Fund wanted
4
something that would include the name of every American killed in Viet
Nam, and would be contemplative and apolitical. They conducted an
open design competition that drew 1,421 entries, all submitted anony-
mously. The winner, Maya Ying Lin, was a Chinese-American undergrad-
uate at Yale: to memorialize men killed in a war in Asia, an Asian female
studying at an old antiwar hotbed.
Opposition to Lin’s design was intense. The opponents wanted some-
5
thing gleaming and grand. To them, the low-slung black wall would send
the same old defeatist, elitist messages that had lost the war in the ’60s
and then stigmatized the veterans in the ’70s. “Creating the memorial
triggered a lot of old angers and rage among vets about the war,” recalls
Wheeler, a captain in Viet Nam and now a Yale-trained government
lawyer. “It got white hot.”
In the end, Lin’s sublime and stirring wall was built, 58,022 names in-
6
scribed. As a compromise with opponents, however, a more conven-
tional figurative sculpture was added to the site last fall (at a cost of
$400,000). It does not spoil the memorial, as the art mandarins had
warned. The three U.S. soldiers, cast in bronze, stand a bit larger than
life, carry automatic weapons and wear fatigues, but the pose is not John
Wayne-heroic: these American boys are spectral and wary, even slightly
- 594 PART FIVE - ADDITIONAL READINGS
bewildered as they gaze southeast toward the wall. While he was plan-
ning the figures, sculptor Frederick Hart spent time watching vets at the
memorial. Hart now grants that “no modernist monument of its kind has
been as successful as that wall. The sculpture and the wall interact beau-
tifully. Everybody won.” Nor does Lin, his erstwhile artistic antagonist,
still feel that Hart’s statue is so awfully trite. “It captures the mood,”
says Lin. “Their faces have a lost look.” Out at the memorial last week,
one veteran looked at the new addition and nodded: “That’s us.”
But it is the wall that vets approach as if it were a force field. It is at
7
the wall that families of the dead cry and leave flowers and mementos and
messages, much as Jews leave notes for God in the cracks of Jerusalem’s
Western Wall. Around the statue, people talk louder and breathe easier,
snap vacation photos unselfconsciously, eat Eskimo Pies and Fritos. But
near the wall, a young Boston father tells his rambunctious son, “Hush,
Timmy—this is like a church.” The visitors’ processionals do seem to
have a ritual, even liturgical quality. Going slowly down toward the ver-
tex, looking at the names, they chat less and less, then fall silent where
the names of the first men killed (July 1959) and the last (May 1975) ap-
pear. The talk begins again, softly, as they follow the path up out of the
little valley of the shadow of death.
For veterans, the memorial was a touchstone from the beginning, and
8
the 1982 dedication ceremony a delayed national embrace. “The actual act
of being at the memorial is healing for the guy or woman who went to Viet
Nam,” says Wheeler, who visits at least monthly. “It has to do with the felt
presence of comrades.” He pauses. “I always look at Tommy Hayes’ name.
Tommy’s up on panel 50 east, line 29.” Hayes, Wheeler’s West Point pal,
was killed 17 years ago this month. “I know guys,” Wheeler says, “who are
still waiting to go, whose wives have told me, ‘He hasn’t been able to do it
yet.’” For those who go, catharsis is common. As Lin says of the names,
chronologically ordered, “Veterans can look at the wall, find a name, and
in a sense put themselves back in that time.” The war has left some resid-
ual pathologies that the memorial cannot leach away. One veteran killed
himself on the amphitheatrical green near the wall. A second, ex-Marine
Randolph Taylor, tried and failed in January. “I regret what I did,” he said.
“I feel like I desecrated a holy place.”
The memorial has become a totem, so much so that its tiniest imper-
9
fections make news. Last fall somebody noticed a few minute cracks at
the seams between several of the granite panels. The cause of the hair-
lines is still unknown, and the builders are a little worried.
Probably no one is more determined than Wheeler to see the memor-
10
ial’s face made perfect, for he savors the startlingly faithful reflections
the walls give off: he loves seeing the crowds of visitors looking simulta-
neously at the names and themselves. “Look!” he said the other day, ges-
turing at panel 4 east. “You see that plane taking off? You see the blue
sky? No one expected that.”
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CHAPTER 28 - DESCRIPTION
The Man in the Water
Roger Rosenblatt
During the 1970s, Roger Rosenblatt served as director of expository writing at Harvard
University. He has also been an editor for The New Republic, The Washington Post, and
U.S. News & World Report, and is currently editor -at-large of Time, Inc., and Long Island
University’s first University Professor of Writing.. He has published Black Fiction (1974),
Children of War (1983), Witness: The World Since Hiroshima (1985), Life Itself: Abor-
tion in the Mind of America (1992), Coming Apart (1997), and Rules for Aging (2000).
As a senior writer for Time magazine, he first published this selection in 1982, following
the crash of an Air Florida plane into the freezing waters of the Potomac River in Wash-
ington, D.C. It was republished in Man in the Water: Essays and Stories (1994).
As disasters go, this one was terrible, but not unique, certainly not
1
among the worst on the roster of U.S. air crashes. There was the unusual
element of the bridge, of course, and the fact that the plane clipped it
at a moment of high traffic, one routine thus intersecting another and
disrupting both. Then, too, there was the location of the event. Washing-
ton, the city of form and regulations, turned chaotic, deregulated, by a
blast of real winter and a single slap of metal on metal. The jets from
Washington National Airport that normally swoop around the presiden-
tial monuments like famished gulls are, for the moment, emblemized by
the one that fell; so there is that detail. And there was the aesthetic clash
as well—blue-and-green Air Florida, the name a flying garden, sunk down
among gray chunks in a black river. All that was worth noticing, to be
sure. Still, there was nothing very special in any of it, except death,
which, while always special, does not necessarily bring millions to tears
or to attention. Why, then, the shock here?
Perhaps because the nation saw in this disaster something more than
2
a mechanical failure. Perhaps because people saw in it no failure at all,
but rather something successful about their makeup. Here, after all, were
two forms of nature in collision: the elements and human character. Last
Wednesday, the elements, indifferent as ever, brought down Flight 90.
And on that same afternoon, human nature—groping and flailing in mys-
teries of its own—rose to the occasion.
Of the four acknowledged heroes of the event, three are able to ac-
3
count for their behavior. Donald Usher and Eugene Windsor, a park po-
lice helicopter team, risked their lives every time they dipped the skids
into the water to pick up survivors. On television, side by side in bright
blue jumpsuits, they described their courage as all in the line of duty.
Lenny Skutnik, a 28 -year-old employee of the Congressional Budget Of-
fice, said: “It’s something I never thought I would do”—referring to his
jumping into the water to drag an injured woman to shore. Skutnik added
that “somebody had to go in the water,” delivering every hero’s line that
is no less admirable for its repetitions. In fact, nobody had to go into the
- 596 PART FIVE - ADDITIONAL READINGS
water. That somebody actually did so is part of the reason this particu-
lar tragedy sticks in the mind.
But the person most responsible for the emotional impact of the dis-
4
aster is the one known at first simply as “the man in the water.” ( Bald-
ing, probably in his 50s, an extravagant mustache.) He was seen clinging
with five other survivors to the tail section of the airplane. This man
was described by Usher and Windsor as appearing alert and in control.
Every time they lowered a lifeline and flotation ring to him, he passed it
on to another of the passengers. “In a mass casualty, you’ll find people
like him,” said Windsor. “But I’ve never seen one with that commitment.”
When the helicopter came back for him, the man had gone under. His self-
lessness was one reason the story held national attention; his anonymity
another. The fact that he went unidentified invested him with a universal
character. For a while he was Everyman, and thus proof (as if one needed
it) that no man is ordinary.
Still, he could never have imagined such a capacity in himself. Only
5
minutes before his character was tested, he was sitting in the ordinary
plane among the ordinary passengers, dutifully listening to the stew-
ardess telling him to fasten his seat belt and saying something about the
“no smoking sign.” So our man relaxed with the others, some of whom
would owe their lives to him. Perhaps he started to read, or to doze, or to
regret some harsh remark made in the office that morning. Then sud-
denly he knew that the trip would not be ordinary. Like every other per-
son on that flight, he was desperate to live, which makes his final act so
stunning.
For at some moment in the water he must have realized that he would
6
not live if he continued to hand over the rope and ring to others. He had
to know it, no matter how gradual the effect of the cold. In his judgment
he had no choice. When the helicopter took off with what was to be the
last survivor, he watched everything in the world move away from him,
and he deliberately let it happen.
Yet there was something else about the man that kept our thoughts
7
on him, and which keeps our thoughts on him still. He was t here, in the
essential, classic circumstance. Man in nature. The man in the water. For
its part, nature cared nothing about the five passengers. Our man, on the
other hand, cared totally. So the timeless battle commenced in the Po-
tomac. For as long as that man could last, they went at each other, nature
and man; the one making no distinctions of good and evil, acting on no
principles, offering no lifelines; the other acting wholly on distinctions,
principles and, one supposes, on faith.
Since it was he who lost the fight, we ought to come again to the con-
8
clusion that people are powerless in the world. In reality, we believe the
reverse, and it takes the act of the man in the water to remind us of our
true feelings in this matter. It is not to say that everyone would have
acted as he did, or as Usher, Windsor and Skutnik. Yet whatever moved
these men to challenge death on behalf of their fellows is not peculiar to
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CHAPTER 28 - DESCRIPTION
them. Everyone feels the possibility in himself. That is the abiding won-
der of the story. That is why we would not let go of it. If the man in the
water gave a lifeline to the people gasping for survival, he was likewise
giving a lifeline to those who observed him.
The odd thing is that we do not even really believe that the man in
9
the water lost his fight. “Everything in Nature contains all the powers of
Nature,” said Emerson. Exactly. So the man in the water had his own nat-
ural powers. He could not make ice storms, or freeze the water until it
froze the blood. But he could hand life over to a stranger, and that is a
power of nature too. The man in the water pitted himself against an im-
placable, impersonal enemy; he fought it with charity; and he held it to a
standoff. He was the best we can do.
- Chapter 29
Narration
38 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police
Martin Gansberg
Martin Gansberg was a reporter and editor for The New York Times for over 40 years,
until his retirement in 1985. He also wrote for such magazines as Diplomat, Catholic Di-
gest, and Facts. This article was published in The New York Times in 1964, shortly after
the murder of Kitty Genovese.
For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in
1
Queens watched a k iller stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks
in Kew Gardens.
Twice the sound of their voices and the sudden glow of their bedroom
2
lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned,
sought her out and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the po-
lice during the assault; one w itness called after the woman was dead.
That was two weeks ago today. But Assistant Chief Inspector Freder-
3
ick M. Lussen, in charge of the borough’s detectives and a veteran of 25
years of homicide investigations, is still shocked.
He can give a matter-of-fact recitation of many murders. But the Kew
4
Gardens slaying baffles him—not because it is a murder, but because the
“good people” failed to call the police.
“As we have reconstructed the crime,” he said, “the assailant had
5
three chances to kill this woman during a 35-minute period. He returned
twice to complete the job. If we had been called when he first attacked,
the woman might not be dead now.”
This is what the police say happened beginning at 3:20 A.M. in the
6
staid, middle-class, tree-lined Austin Street area:
Twenty-eight-year-old Catherine Genovese, who was called Kitty by
7
almost everyone in the neighborhood, was returning home from her job
as manager of a bar in Hollis. She parked her red Fiat in a lot adjacent to
the Kew Gardens Long Island Rail Road Station, facing Mowbray Place.
Like many residents of the neighborhood, she had parked there day after
nguon tai.lieu . vn
