Is America A Melting Pot?

America is a melting pot in many different ways. We have an enormous influx of immigrants every year and we have people from every single ethnicity, background, race, religion, culture and nationality possible in the country. The real proof that we're a melting pot is that for the most part, the races and ethnicities mix together in everyday life without a problem. Sure there are the extreme cases of racist hate crimes and segregation, but those are not the norm. For the most part everyone has a chance at upward mobility and if they put in the work, they can be extremely successful. We even have an African American president. However, there are people who are trying to prevent America from being such a mixture of cultures and beliefs. Some people are extremely ethnocentric and think that America should only be full of W.A.S.Ps (While Anglo-Saxon Protestants). They are completely insane and think that immigrants are dirty thieves who are trying to abuse our system and find loopholes to better their lives. What they don't seem to realize is that they're ancestors were immigrants to who came into the country, ravaged the land, killed the natives and destroyed the landscape in order to construct their towns and cities. So what their ancestors did was far worse than what the immigrants of today are doing. So even though these people are trying to discourage immigration and impose laws and policies that make life harder for people who are here illegally or who aren't full citizens yet, America is still becoming the melting pot of the world. Their attempts to suppress the diversity in America are essentially useless and we will continue to grow in diversity as time progresses.

Identity, Society, and Culture

Our position in the world affects how we view our lives in such a great way and half of the time, we don't even realize it. It affects many aspects of our lives such as how we view identity, society and culture. Being from the middle class, I can really only give my views on such things because I've never really been part of any other class and therefore don't have any other experience to base my ideas off of. Along with being part of the middle class, I'm an 18 year old American male, which affects my views a lot as well. I'm technically in one of the most privileged positions that I could possibly be in in the world. So, being an 18 year old, middle class, American, male, I view things based on experiences I've had so far in my life. Being an 18 year old, my views on identity are very different than those of say a 50 year old. I'm trying to define my identity right now and figure out who I want to be for the rest of my life, while a 50 year old might be just keeping true to the personality they decided fit them best 30 years ago. Being a male in this society/culture also affects my views. As a male, we're pushed to be more aggressive, masculine, successful, etc. We're supposed to be the bread winners and the leaders of the world (yes it's sexist, but we have a patriarchal society). Being from the middle class also gives me access to opportunities to better myself and give myself chances to make something of myself through furthering my education that people of other classes may not have access to.  So my views on society can be similar to those of people of all races, ages and genders around me because the society as a whole puts similar pressures on and gives similar chances to everyone within certain categories. Our culture is also very focused on independence and being successful of your own accord. So, the pressures to make it on your own are almost universal in America and my views on how cultures should push people can again be very similar to those around me.

Chapter 6 Reading Synthesis

Chapter 6 discusses how to integrate outside sources into your research paper effectively. What I took away from it was mostly the fact that you aren't using your outside sources to create your argument, you're using them to back up what you're saying. Most people try to find sources and then base their argument around them so they know they'll have information backing it up. However, this is not a very smart way to handle a research assignment. What you want to do is to create your argument and then find sources that fit it, not vice versa. So, once you've found these sources, you don't want to just thrown in random quotes or information into your paper, you need to integrate it in an intelligent manner. You find points that back up ideas you have and then when you're discussing these ideas in your paper, you'll bring in the outside information to back up your point and make it seem more valid. You can paraphrase the information, take a direct quote, or summarize the information in order to back up your claims, you just have to make sure it fits well within the paper and doesn't disrupt the flow by being awkwardly placed somewhere it might not necessarily go well. That's what it's talking about when it says you need to integrate your sources, not insert them. Don't just throw them into your paper where you're talking about a certain idea just because that information backs it up. You need to make it seem like the ideas were fluid and you knew exactly where that quote or paraphrasing was going to end up all along. You also want to mix up which form of integration you use. You don't want to just use a bunch of quotes and have your paper be littered with them. It gets boring reading someone else's words in your paper. So use paraphrasing, summarizing and direct quotation throughout the paper and change it up for the reader in order to keep them interested and present your argument to them more effectively.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster

In the two posters on page 433, you see several burly men, whose faces aren't shown, that resemble famous pop culture icons such as Hulk Hogan and Sylvester Stallone as well as some "fit" women such as an Olympic athlete and a ballerina. The poster on the left is pretty bland and just gives you the name of the film ("Bigger, Stronger, Faster: The Side Effects of Being an American") and the tagline "Is it still cheating if everyone's doing it?" with the banner covering the faces of a San Francisco Giants baseball player, Hulk Hogan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone. It lets you understand the movie is dealing with steroid use because those 4 pop culture icons have all admitted to using steroids to improve their physique at some point in their careers. However, that is about all you get out of that poster. The one on the right is where a lot of the big symbols come in. Standing on top of a mountain of steroid pills and hypodermic needles stands Hulk Hogan in his signature pose. Surrounding him are Sylvester Stallone as "Rocky" with his arms raised, a female USA Olympic athlete, a San Francisco Giants baseball player holding an enormous American flag (to show that steroids are just a part of American society now) that encompasses a good portion of the poster a ballerina jumping through the air and Arnold Schwarzenegger standing at a podium. While no one's face is shown again, you can easily identify which pop culture icon it's referring to. You can also easily identify the purpose of the movie based on the fact that it's common knowledge that these celebrities have all used steroids at some point and they're standing on a giant mound of pills and needles. It shows the tagline again at the top "Is it still cheating if everyone's doing it?" and the title in large letters "Bigger Faster Stronger: The Side Effects of Being an American." It intrigues viewers and makes them wonder exactly what the movie is going to be talking about. Over the past few decades, athletes and celebrities that have used performance enhancing drugs have been punished and frowned upon for engaging in such activities, but the tagline makes a viewer curious as to whether or not they're going to condone the use of steroids due to it's popularity among athletes in American society. Overall they utilize the images very well and grab the attention of the viewer and make them wonder exactly what they movie is about due to the ambiguity of the poster and the great use of ethos, logos and rhetoric in general.

Chapter 7 Reading Response

When I'm taking notes (which is rare to begin with), I make sure to keep the ideas concise and to the point so I'm not writing too much and I can keep a good pace going. When I'm taking notes that I'll be using for research, however, my method changes a little bit. I still try to write concise notes that aren't full of fluff so I can just get the main point when I go back over the notes, but now I have to make sure to cite the source that I got the idea from. I won't necessarily write out the full citation right then and there, but I will make a note of where I got the information such as the title of the book or a website URL. This helps me avoid plagiarism later on when I'm integrating the information into my argument. When I'm scanning through a lot of sources, I'll remember certain facts I came across that I found useful, I just won't remember exactly where they came from if I don't write it down as soon as I decide to use any of the information I found. And since plagiarism can be so accidental a lot of the time, it's worth the extra 20 seconds it takes to write down the source as you're going than to risk someone realizing you've plagiarized and getting into serious trouble. As the book states, it's also a matter of respect to mention whoever's ideas you're using to back up your argument because you're giving them the formal recognition that they had a useful idea and that you found it helpful. So, while I try to make my note taking as short of a process as possible, I don't try to shorten it by negating to write down sources and risking the chance of plagiarism since it can lead to such severe punishment and possibly even expulsion.

Interview Comparison

In the two interviews, the one dealing with embedding reporters in war zones and the other discussing the "McDonaldsization" of our country, you can see a few similarities as well as differences. They're both using their arguments to prove that their subject is an unpleasant one and that we need to bring about changes to it as a country. With the first interview, they're trying to show that while we want a high tech coverage of what's going on with our troops overseas, it's not the safest or smartest plan to just plant reporters right in the middle of the war zone because they're right in harms way. So they set up the interview to say that this isn't the best idea, and then have quotes from reporters that were in an area while it was being attacked so you could understand how horrified they really were. They do this so it's much easier to convince you that their point is correct. The same goes for the Ritzer interview. By just having one person answer questions and give you only their opinion, you're getting a very biased point of view, but a very effective one. Since you're not hearing the other side of the argument, you are much more likely to side with what he's saying because he does make valid points and talks in a very intelligent manor. So, they planned that interview to be very one sided and to just be a Q&A session with the interviewer in order to give the readers only one side of the argument that they were presenting. At least with the first interview, they gave you a few different examples and showed you different perspectives on the issue, so that you could somewhat decide for yourself. You were just more likely to side with the fact that it wasn't safe for reporters to be out there because you can read the transcripts of what they were saying as they were being attacked.

Chapter 13 Reading Response

Different types of texts provide a well rounded view on certain topics across the entire board. They're usually consisted of first hand accounts and second hand accounts where people are simply recounting what someone else told them about their personal experiences or their observations on a topic. With the topic of minorities in sports and stardom in chapter 13, the ranges of texts fall more into the second category and consist mostly of second hand accounts of what it's like to be a minority celebrity. However, with the "Expect Great" Commercial with Sue Bird, you get someone who actually is a minority in sports (WNBA) telling you that women can be just as good as men at the sport and trying to get people to open their eyes to see that. The rest of the texts do tend to fall into the second category, such as "Doin' Me": From Young, Black, Rich, and Famous. Boyd describes how famous African American athletes act such as Tim Duncan, Allen Iverson and Joe Louis bring styles from their culture into the sport and how people react, but he's not describing his own personal experience, just his observations of famous athletes and his ideas on why they act and dress a certain way. With Say It Ain't So, Big Leagues by Dave Zirin, he talks about how Major League Baseball relies on upcoming talent born and raised in Latin America and how a large portion of the big players today hail from Latin American countries. He describes how the culture in Latin America makes it easy for baseball scouts to tell people they'll become rich and famous if they come and play for a certain team, but yet again, he isn't describing his personal experiences. He is merely writing about his observations on the relationship between Latin American players and Major League Baseball. So, both types of sources (first hand and second hand) help develop different perspectives on certain topics by giving the reader a specific side of the story that the author wants to present. That's why you have to evaluate the level of bias in a text when reading it to determine if it is really credible or not to use to try and back up an idea, because people can skew things so far to fit their purpose that it may end up giving you false information and making your argument suffer inevitably.