.KEYWORD ppbookmonth0799
.FLYINGHEAD PALMPOWER BOOK CLUB
.TITLE Happy Fourth of July
.DEPT
.SUMMARY Get yourself ready for the long, hot summer. This month, Judith Tabron writes our book club column, which celebrates the 4th, summer, what it’s like to be an American, and, well, a fine recipe for Mongolian Beef.
.AUTHOR Judith Tabron
We Americans get a day off this month to celebrate Independence Day, which is enough reason to pause and reflect on the purpose of the holiday. For those of you reading this article from outside the states, this will either be a nice reminder of home or a good look inside the head of us "Yanks".
Of course, any reason to not go into work is, by definition, a good thing. Sometimes I think we should be honest with ourselves and just call the Fourth of July "Barbeque Day" or "Air-Conditioned Movie Day"?
Ever since I was a little girl wondering how they made those fireworks go off in the shape of the flag, I’ve always felt proud to be an American on July 4th. Yes, we’re puritanical and heavily armed. But we also have, like, democracy and some junk.
If you’d like to remind yourself of that act of rebellion we’re supposed to be celebrating, check out the Declaration of Independence, available from several sites, including MemoWare at http://www.memoware.com.
You show me a U.S. citizen who says "I don’t much think of myself as American" and I’ll show you an American who’s never been abroad. You don’t know how American you are until you go someplace else. Not only will everyone else immediately identify you as an American (before you even open your mouth — how can they tell??) but you will be homesick for things like shopping malls and the right to free speech.
You might think you’d be homesick for food, but that never happens. No matter what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, McDonald’s, of course, is everywhere — but places like Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken are catching up. Recently I read that Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in China were besieged with protestors after our unfortunate accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Serbia. And like you, my first thought on reading that was: China has KFC? And they say Sino-American relations are in the toilet. How can that be when they can get Original Recipe?
.H1 Original Recipe: American satire
You remember satire. Americans used to be good at it. Now it’s pretty much limited to Michael Moore and Dennis Miller. But we used to be famous for it, and Mark Twain was one of our major exports in the satire arena.
Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad is still a funny, wry commentary on being American out among the people who live in the rest of the world. Twain’s journalistic style makes this long work easy to read — it’s really a series of accounts of various travels, each one relatively stand-alone. When he was traveling the world, America was barely out of the dusty frontier stage and was certainly still a rough backwater. Twain wallows in his own American-ness, making constant sarcastic remarks about "natives" who haven’t caught on to the joys of capitalism yet, and about old-world types who worship rather nasty ruins and don’t wash often enough.
Twain’s a little like Zaphod Beeblebrox (one of our friends from the classic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). You can’t always tell when he’s being sarcastic because (a) he’s satirizing the American point of view, (b) when he’s being sarcastic to cover his sense of awe at what he sees, or (c) when he’s being sarcastic because he’s genuinely making fun of what he’s reporting about.
And some of the time Twain’s just plain funny, as when he’s describing the difficulty of conveying the need for soap in one’s bath to the staff of a Paris hotel.
However, he always has his own take on the topic. Personally I don’t mind what the media calls "political correctness" because to me it always looks practically indistinguishable from what my grandmother called "good manners." But even I must admit that writers today — not the good ones, but many of the mediocre ones — use political correctness as an excuse to have no opinions at all.
If you’re with me on this, you’ll find A Tramp Abroad a refreshing treat. Sometimes Twain is undeniably racist and classist and he’s always an American chauvinist: no matter what he’s talking about, whether it’s a lake in Switzerland or the lack of soap in Paris, the American way is the right way; the American countryside the measure by which all else is measured.
But Twain also has a great eye for the telling detail, and he never hesitates to give you his own idiosyncratic opinion. Relating the French reverence for Heloise and Abelard, the star-crossed twelfth century lovers who are still memorialized by those who leave flowers on their grave, Twain points out that they all overlook the simple fact that Abelard was a teacher who took advantage of his young student and ought to have been horse-whipped.
And Twain has an eye for that which truly inspires awe. Even while he’s telling you that Lake Como is not as large as Lake Tahoe in the States, he describes the lake in such exact detail that, you too, can see the vegetation clinging to the precipices that line the lake. You can see the beautiful blues and greens which really are startling to the eye; and you can feel the serenity of the beautiful place.
.H1 And liberty for all.
Yes. All. The true test of American democracy is whether or not everyone gets his or her share. That’s been a problem ever since America’s founders said "All men are created equal" then restricted the vote based on your cash value.
Statistically speaking, if you’re an American, you probably owe some of your civil rights to Frederick Douglass, a politically important figure of the nineteenth century who doesn’t get talked about enough. Not only was he instrumental in convincing Abraham Lincoln of the need to free the slaves, he attended the women’s rights conference in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19 and 20 of 1848 and helped shape the women’s rights movement in this country.
Douglass was apparently an impressive public speaker and in his work, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, you can hear his personal voice. The language is precise, simple and direct, like a good speech. He was himself awed by the power of words and after reading his story you will be too.
In his support of the abolitionist cause Douglass reported the facts of life under the regime of slavery, counteracting the arguments of those who said that the slave’s life was a happy one, that indeed a slave had no worries since his food and shelter were provided for him. (These were common arguments in support of slavery.) Douglass’ report of his life as an enslaved person and later as an escaped slave convey the horrors of slave owners’ physical brutality as well as their psychic abuse. It is horrible when a man is beaten with a whip until his back is lacerated and bleeding. But how much more horrible is it when the man who orders the beating is his own father, and the man who ties him up is his own brother, albeit from a white mother and not a black one?
The book is violent in places, as it must be in order to tell such a story, but the violence is never sensationalized and never described in loving detail. It’s there because the life of an American slave, in Douglass’ experience, was frequently marked by violence.
From the opening pages, when Douglass tells us that he doesn’t know the date of his birth, this gripping work really opens your eyes to what it means to not be free. Ignore all the prefatory material. The book is introduced by a few famous abolitionists of the day, whose letters served the purpose of giving the white men’s seal of approval on the book in its original editions; the letters are generally uninteresting now. Dive in to the main part of the book and I suspect you’ll find it hard to stop.
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.H1 When you’re done with deep thoughts…
If it’s too hot where you are to read anything long, or in addition to the works mentioned above, you might want a few fun tidbits to get you through the second half of summer.
If you’re going to MacWorld in New York this August, you might want the list of MacWorld Expo Exhibitors in JFile format from MemoWare.
If you’ve seen Disney’s new movie Tarzan (the animation is extremely cool), read the original Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs did a great job of writing fast and furious adventure tales and the story of Tarzan is modern mythmaking.
And if you’re sick of slaving over a hot stove in the July heat, get yourself some quick and simple recipes from Raelani’s PalmTexts page at http://www.wahine.net/palmtexts/ (it’s good to break out of the usual sources for docs once in a while.) The Mongolian beef looks like a winner and wok cooking shouldn’t heat up your kitchen too badly.
Mmm. Mongolian Beef. Suddenly I’m hungry. See you later!
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
Visit MemoWare, maintained by Craig Froehle, at http://www.memoware.com.
The PalmPilot Library, at http://www.pilotlibrary.org, has merged with MemoWare.
Visit The Lending Library, maintained by John Swain, at http://www.macduff.net.
The Palm organizer E-text Web-Ring is no longer available at http://www.pilotlibrary.org/webring.html; but you can find it at http://members.xoom.com/S_Strasse/Palm/etext_webring.html.
Visit Raelani’s PalmTexts at http://www.wahine.net/palmtexts/.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Judith Tabron also answers to Dr. Jude; she wishes that she were in another country right now, preferably one cooler than Boston has been for the last month. She is in charge of instructional technology at Brandeis University.
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.ee6d37a
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