A Quilt of a Country

PRESENTATION

A Quilt of a country

START

Standards

10.1(A)

10.2(B)

10.3

10.4(B)

10.4(C)

10.4(D)

10.4(F)

10.4(G)

10.5(C)

10.5(D)

10.5(G)

10.6(B)

What will our lesson look like?

Language Objective

Learning Intention

Students will understand how authors use figurative language and rhetorical strategies to convey complex ideas, especially in the context of a diverse society.

• I will articulate my understanding of the author's use of figurative language in writing.
• I will express my opinions and interpretations using appropriate academic language.

Success Criteria

• I can identify and analyze at least two instances of figurative language in the text.
• I can independently analyze a passage and express my interpretation in writing.

Do Now

• What does the term "melting pot" mean to you?
• Write a brief response reflecting on the concept of a diverse society.

Introduction

Anna Quindlen (b. 1952) is a decorated American journalist and author. She is a bestselling author of nine novels, three of which were made into movies. Anna also won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992 for her op-ed column in the New York Times. “A Quilt of a Country” was written mere weeks after the September 11th terrorist attacks that devastated Americans. Quindlen’s thoughts about America, especially in the wake of terrorism and fear, are poignant and personal since New York is her home. She dissects her homeland to its core, evaluating equality and tolerance—or lack thereof—in the contemporary American landscape. *Watch StudySync Video

Anna Quindlen

Vocabulary

abet

bigotry

coalesce

disparate

verb to assist or encourage

noun the intolerance and prejudice of any belief or opinion that is different from one’s own

verb to come together to form one group or mass

adjective made up of or containing different elements

Specific Vocabulary

Portnoy’s Complaint

Mario Cuomo

Balkanization

Calvinism

person governor of New York from 1983–1994.

verb refers to the division of a territory into smaller, often hostile units.

noun a 1969 novel by Philip Roth

noun A Christian theology that focuses on the power of God and human moral weakness.

Entry Point

• Pluralism is the condition of having a diverse set of people—from different ethnic, religious, linguistic, or cultural groups—coexisting together.
• The idea of pluralism originated in ancient Greece as the great thinkers of the time realized the cultural differences between Greeks, Egyptians, and Persians.
• The foundation of the United States of America is built upon a dedication to pluralism. For example, laws protect religious diversity and allow for diversity of beliefs in government through elected officials.
• American society is one of the most significant examples of pluralism today, composed of people of many different political beliefs, religions, races, and ethnicities. The interplay between all of these various groups is one of the most cherished and vital aspects of national culture.
• However, pluralism has also led to a struggle for a national identity. Evolving influences of immigrant groups and resistance to these influences from established groups has created a contentious dynamic when attempting to describe a national identity for the country.

Summary

Anna Quindlen states that America is “an improbable idea,” a “mongrel nation,” cobbled together from discordant parts like a quilt. Still, the nation often fails to live up to the notion that all men are created equal, descending into bigotry rather than displaying tolerance. She wonders how, despite all the injustice, this nation is still a success. To some extent, we’ve always been divided among ethnic lines: Irish and Italians during her childhood, and Cambodians and Mexicans in California today. However, even though one faction always seems on the verge of battle with another, our nation is still united. This is because the American psyche is driven by determination to do the difficult thing. For Quindlen, this is the essence of patriotism: those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 come from many different places but represent a nation united as one spirit.

America is an improbable idea. A mongrel nation built of ever-changing disparate parts, it is held together by a notion, the notion that all men are created equal, though everyone knows that most men consider themselves better than someone. "Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image," the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote. That's because it was built of bits and pieces that seem discordant, like the crazy quilts that have been one of its great folk-art forms, velvet and calico and checks and brocades. Out of many, one. That is the ideal. The reality is often quite different, a great national striving consisting frequently of failure. Many of the oft-told stories of the most pluralistic nation on earth are stories not of tolerance, but of bigotry .Slavery and sweatshops, the burning of crosses and the ostracism of the other. Children learn in social-studies class and in the news of the lynching of blacks, the denial of rights to women, the murders of gay men. It is difficult to know how to convince them that this amounts to "crown thy good with brotherhood," that amid all the failures is something spectacularly successful. Perhaps they understand it at this moment, when enormous tragedy, as it so often does, demands a time of reflection on enormous blessings. This is a nation founded on a conundrum, what Mario Cuomo has characterized as "community added to individualism." These two are our defining ideals; they are also in constant conflict. Historians today bemoan the ascendancy of a kind of prideful apartheid in America, saying that the clinging to ethnicity, in background and custom, has undermined the concept of unity. These historians must have forgotten the past, or have gilded it. The New York of my children is no more Balkanized, probably less so, than the Philadelphia of my father, in which Jewish boys would walk several blocks out of their way to avoid the Irish divide of Chester Avenue. (I was the product of a mixed marriage, across barely bridgeable lines: an Italian girl, an Irish boy. How quaint it seems now, how incendiary then.) The Brooklyn of Francie Nolan's famous tree, the Newark of which Portnoy complained, even the uninflected WASP suburbs of Cheever's characters: they are ghettos, pure and simple. Do the Cambodians and the Mexicans in California coexist less easily today than did the Irish and Italians of Massachusetts a century ago? You know the answer.

What is the point of this splintered whole? What is the point of a nation in which Arab cabbies chauffeur Jewish passengers through the streets of New York—and in which Jewish cabbies chauffeur Arab passengers, too, and yet speak in theory of hatred, one for the other? What is the point of a nation in which one part seems to be always on the verge of fisticuffs with another, blacks and whites, gays and straights, left and right, Pole and Chinese and Puerto Rican and Slovenian? Other countries with such divisions have in fact divided into new nations with new names, but not this one, impossibly interwoven even in its hostilities. Once these disparate parts were held together by a common enemy, by the fault lines of world wars and the electrified fence of communism. With the end of the cold war there was the creeping concern that without a focus for hatred and distrust, a sense of national identity would evaporate, that the left side of the hyphen—African-American, Mexican-American, Irish-American—would overwhelm the right. And slow-growing domestic traumas like economic unrest and increasing crime seemed more likely to emphasize division than community. Today the citizens of the United States have come together once more because of armed conflict and enemy attack. Terrorism has led to devastation—and unity. Yet even in 1994, the overwhelming majority of those surveyed by the National Opinion Research Center agreed with this statement: “The U.S. is a unique country that stands for something special in the world.” One of the things that it stands for is this vexing notion that a great nation can consist entirely of refugees from other nations, that people of different, even warring religions and cultures can live, if not side by side, than on either side of the country's Chester Avenues. Faced with this diversity there is little point in trying to isolate anything remotely resembling a national character, but there are two strains of behavior that, however tenuously, abet the concept of unity. There is that Calvinist undercurrent in the American psyche that loves the difficult, the demanding, that sees mastering the impossible, whether it be prairie or subway, as a test of character, and so glories in the struggle of this fractured coalescing. And there is a grudging fairness among the citizens of the United States that eventually leads most to admit that, no matter what the English-only

advocates try to suggest, the new immigrants are not so different from our own parents or grandparents. Leonel Castillo, former director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and himself the grandson of Mexican immigrants, once told the writer Studs Terkel proudly, "The old neighborhood Ma-Pa stores are still around. They are not Italian or Jewish or Eastern European any more. Ma and Pa are now Korean, Vietnamese, Iraqi, Jordanian, Latin American. They live in the store. They work seven days a week. Their kids are doing well in school. They're making it. Sound familiar?" Tolerance is the word used most often when this kind of coexistence succeeds, but tolerance is a vanilla-pudding word, standing for little more than the allowance of letting others live unremarked and unmolested. Pride seems excessive, given the American willingness to endlessly complain about them, them being whoever is new, different, unknown or currently under suspicion. But patriotism is partly taking pride in this unlikely ability to throw all of us together in a country that across its length and breadth is as different as a dozen countries, and still be able to call it by one name. When photographs of the faces of all those who died in the World Trade Center destruction are assembled in one place, it will be possible to trace in the skin color, the shape of the eyes and the noses, the texture of the hair, a map of the world. These are the representatives of a mongrel nation that somehow, at times like this, has one spirit. Like many improbable ideas, when it actually works, it's a wonder. ______________________________________________________________________________________ From Newsweek, 9/26/01 ©2001 Newsweek Media Group. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. www.newsweek.com.

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