Complete paper according to requirements.Need to put the thesis in a separate document for me.All materials and requirements are in the attachmentPaper requirements are in the word document of The writer.
assignment_requirement.png
the_persian_carpet_1.png
the_persian_carpet_2.png
assignment_requirement.png
ethics_by_linda_pastan.docx
sixty_nine_cents.doc
ethics_by_linda_pastan.docx
sixty_nine_cents.doc
the_valley_of_the_gun.pdf
the_writer.docx
the_writer_and_assignment_requirement__and_the_persian_carpet.docx
Unformatted Attachment Preview
“Ethics” by Linda Pastan
In ethics class so many years ago
our teacher asked this question every fall:
If there were a fire in a museum,
which would you save, a Rembrandt painting
or an old woman who hadn’t many
years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs
caring little for pictures or old age
we’d opt one year for life, the next for art
and always half-heartedly. Sometimes
the woman borrowed my grandmother’s face
leaving her usual kitchen to wander
some drafty, half-imagined museum.
One year, feeling clever, I replied
why not let the woman decide herself?
Linda, the teacher would report, eschews
the burdens of responsibility.
This fall in a real museum I stand
before a real Rembrandt, old woman,
or nearly so, myself. The colors
within this frame are darker than autumn,
darker even than winter — the browns of earth,
though earth’s most radiant elements burn
through the canvas. I know now that woman
and painting and season are almost one
and all beyond the saving of children.
when I was fourteen years old, I lost my Russian accent. I
could, in theory, walk up to a girl and the words “Oh, hi
there” would not sound like Okht Hyzer, possibly the name
of a Turkish politician. There were three things I wanted to
do in my new incarnation: go to Florida, where I understood
that our nation’s best and brightest had built themselves a
sandy, vice-filled paradise; have a girl, preferably
native-born, tell me that she liked me in some way; and eat
all my meals at McDonald’s. I did not have the pleasure of
eating at McDonald’s often. My parents believed that going
to restaurants and buying clothes not sold by weight on
Orchard Street were things done only by the very wealthy or
the very profligate, maybe those extravagant “welfare
queens” we kept hearing about on television. Even my
parents, however, as uncritically in love with America as
only immigrants can be, could not resist the iconic pull of
Florida, the call of the beach and the Mouse.
And so, in the midst of my Hebrew-school winter vacation,
two Russian families crammed into a large used sedan and
took I-95 down to the Sunshine State. The other
family—three members in all—mirrored our own, except
that their single offspring was a girl and they were, on the
whole, more ample; by contrast, my entire family weighed
three hundred pounds. There’s a picture of us beneath the
monorail at EPCOT Center, each of us trying out a different
smile to express the déjà-vu feeling of standing squarely in
our new country’s greatest attraction, my own megawatt
grin that of a turn-of-the-century Jewish peddler
scampering after a potential sidewalk sale. The Disney
tickets were a freebie, for which we had had to sit through a
sales pitch for an Orlando time-share. “You’re from
Moscow?” the time-share salesman asked, appraising the
polyester cut of my father’s jib.
Get the best of The New Yorker every day, in your in-box.
Sign me up
Will be used in accordance with our
Privacy Policy.
“Leningrad.”
“Let me guess: mechanical engineer?”
“Yes, mechanical engineer. . . . Eh, please Disney tickets
now.”
The ride over the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach was
my real naturalization ceremony. I wanted all of it—the palm
trees, the yachts bobbing beside the hard-currency mansions,
the concrete-and-glass condominiums preening at their own
reflections in the azure pool water below, the implicit
availability of relations with amoral women. I could see
myself on a balcony eating a Big Mac, casually throwing fries
over my shoulder into the sea-salted air. But I would have to
wait. The hotel reserved by my parents’ friends featured
army cots instead of beds and a half-foot-long cockroach
evolved enough to wave what looked like a fist at us. Scared
out of Miami Beach, we decamped for Fort Lauderdale,
where a Yugoslav woman sheltered us in a faded motel,
beach-adjacent and featuring free UHF reception. We
always seemed to be at the margins of places: the driveway
of the Fontainebleau Hilton, or the glassed-in elevator
leading to a rooftop restaurant where we could momentarily
peek over the “Please Wait to Be Seated” sign at the endless
ocean below, the Old World we had left behind so far and yet
deceptively near.
To my parents and their friends, the Yugoslav motel was an
unquestioned paradise, a lucky coda to a set of difficult lives.
My father lay magnificently beneath the sun in his
red-and-black striped imitation Speedo while I stalked down
the beach, past baking Midwestern girls. “Oh, hi there.” The
words, perfectly American, not a birthright but an
acquisition, perched between my lips, but to walk up to one
of those girls and say something so casual required a deep
rootedness to the hot sand beneath me, a historical presence
thicker than the green card embossed with my thumbprint
and freckled face. Back at the motel, the “Star Trek” reruns
looped endlessly on Channel 73 or 31 or some other prime
number, the washed-out Technicolor planets more familiar
to me than our own.
On the drive back to New York, I plugged myself firmly into
my Walkman, hoping to forget our vacation. Sometime after
the palm trees ran out, somewhere in southern Georgia, we
stopped at a McDonald’s. I could already taste it: The
sixty-nine-cent hamburger. The ketchup, red and decadent,
embedded with little flecks of grated onion. The uplift of the
pickle slices; the obliterating rush of fresh Coca-Cola; the
soda tingle at the back of the throat signifying that the act
was complete. I ran into the meat-fumigated coldness of the
magical place, the larger Russians following behind me,
lugging something big and red. It was a cooler, packed,
before we left the motel, by the other mother, the kindly,
round-faced equivalent of my own mother. She had
prepared a full Russian lunch for us. Soft-boiled eggs
wrapped in tinfoil; vinigret, the Russian beet salad,
overflowing a reused container of sour cream; cold chicken
served between crisp white furrows of a bulka. “But it’s not
allowed,” I pleaded. “We have to buy the food here.”
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE
“Ethics” by Linda Pastan
In ethics class so many years ago
our teacher asked this question every fall:
If there were a fire in a museum,
which would you save, a Rembrandt painting
or an old woman who hadn’t many
years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs
caring little for pictures or old age
we’d opt one year for life, the next for art
and always half-heartedly. Sometimes
the woman borrowed my grandmother’s face
leaving her usual kitchen to wander
some drafty, half-imagined museum.
One year, feeling clever, I replied
why not let the woman decide herself?
Linda, the teacher would report, eschews
the burdens of responsibility.
This fall in a real museum I stand
before a real Rembrandt, old woman,
or nearly so, myself. The colors
within this frame are darker than autumn,
darker even than winter — the browns of earth,
though earth’s most radiant elements burn
through the canvas. I know now that woman
and painting and season are almost one
and all beyond the saving of children.
when I was fourteen years old, I lost my Russian accent. I
could, in theory, walk up to a girl and the words “Oh, hi
there” would not sound like Okht Hyzer, possibly the name
of a Turkish politician. There were three things I wanted to
do in my new incarnation: go to Florida, where I understood
that our nation’s best and brightest had built themselves a
sandy, vice-filled paradise; have a girl, preferably
native-born, tell me that she liked me in some way; and eat
all my meals at McDonald’s. I did not have the pleasure of
eating at McDonald’s often. My parents believed that going
to restaurants and buying clothes not sold by weight on
Orchard Street were things done only by the very wealthy or
the very profligate, maybe those extravagant “welfare
queens” we kept hearing about on television. Even my
parents, however, as uncritically in love with America as
only immigrants can be, could not resist the iconic pull of
Florida, the call of the beach and the Mouse.
And so, in the midst of my Hebrew-school winter vacation,
two Russian families crammed into a large used sedan and
took I-95 down to the Sunshine State. The other
family—three members in all—mirrored our own, except
that their single offspring was a girl and they were, on the
whole, more ample; by contrast, my entire family weighed
three hundred pounds. There’s a picture of us beneath the
monorail at EPCOT Center, each of us trying out a different
smile to express the déjà-vu feeling of standing squarely in
our new country’s greatest attraction, my own megawatt
grin that of a turn-of-the-century Jewish peddler
scampering after a potential sidewalk sale. The Disney
tickets were a freebie, for which we had had to sit through a
sales pitch for an Orlando time-share. “You’re from
Moscow?” the time-share salesman asked, appraising the
polyester cut of my father’s jib.
Get the best of The New Yorker every day, in your in-box.
Sign me up
Will be used in accordance with our
Privacy Policy.
“Leningrad.”
“Let me guess: mechanical engineer?”
“Yes, mechanical engineer. . . . Eh, please Disney tickets
now.”
The ride over the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach was
my real naturalization ceremony. I wanted all of it—the palm
trees, the yachts bobbing beside the hard-currency mansions,
the concrete-and-glass condominiums preening at their own
reflections in the azure pool water below, the implicit
availability of relations with amoral women. I could see
myself on a balcony eating a Big Mac, casually throwing fries
over my shoulder into the sea-salted air. But I would have to
wait. The hotel reserved by my parents’ friends featured
army cots instead of beds and a half-foot-long cockroach
evolved enough to wave what looked like a fist at us. Scared
out of Miami Beach, we decamped for Fort Lauderdale,
where a Yugoslav woman sheltered us in a faded motel,
beach-adjacent and featuring free UHF reception. We
always seemed to be at the margins of places: the driveway
of the Fontainebleau Hilton, or the glassed-in elevator
leading to a rooftop restaurant where we could momentarily
peek over the “Please Wait to Be Seated” sign at the endless
ocean below, the Old World we had left behind so far and yet
deceptively near.
To my parents and their friends, the Yugoslav motel was an
unquestioned paradise, a lucky coda to a set of difficult lives.
My father lay magnificently beneath the sun in his
red-and-black striped imitation Speedo while I stalked down
the beach, past baking Midwestern girls. “Oh, hi there.” The
words, perfectly American, not a birthright but an
acquisition, perched between my lips, but to walk up to one
of those girls and say something so casual required a deep
rootedness to the hot sand beneath me, a historical presence
thicker than the green card embossed with my thumbprint
and freckled face. Back at the motel, the “Star Trek” reruns
looped endlessly on Channel 73 or 31 or some other prime
number, the washed-out Technicolor planets more familiar
to me than our own.
On the drive back to New York, I plugged myself firmly into
my Walkman, hoping to forget our vacation. Sometime after
the palm trees ran out, somewhere in southern Georgia, we
stopped at a McDonald’s. I could already taste it: The
sixty-nine-cent hamburger. The ketchup, red and decadent,
embedded with little flecks of grated onion. The uplift of the
pickle slices; the obliterating rush of fresh Coca-Cola; the
soda tingle at the back of the throat signifying that the act
was complete. I ran into the meat-fumigated coldness of the
magical place, the larger Russians following behind me,
lugging something big and red. It was a cooler, packed,
before we left the motel, by the other mother, the kindly,
round-faced equivalent of my own mother. She had
prepared a full Russian lunch for us. Soft-boiled eggs
wrapped in tinfoil; vinigret, the Russian beet salad,
overflowing a reused container of sour cream; cold chicken
served between crisp white furrows of a bulka. “But it’s not
allowed,” I pleaded. “We have to buy the food here.”
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE
JOE BAGE ANT -f Valley of the Gun
THE FAMILY IN DIFFERENT CULTURES
31
Joe Bageant
Recommended Films on This Theme
Ordinary People (United States, 1980) The story of a wealthy fam
ily devastated by the death of their olddst son;
Fanny and Alexander “(Sweden, 1983) an engaging tale of a
Swedish family as seen through the eyes of their two yoime
children;
,
.
°
The Joy Luck Club (United States/China, 1*993) a film based on
Amy Tan’s novel^that explores the relationships of four Chinese
mothers and theif American-bom daughters;
Kolya (Czech Republic, 1996) fire story of a womanizing cellist
who marries for money and is left to raise his wife’s five-vearoldson.
^
Valley of the Gun
—
^ ^ ————-
Joe Bageant was born in 1946 in Virginia, served in the Navy during the
Vietnam War, and has developed a unique voice as an iconoclastic cur
mudgeon speaking out on many social issues. He has written for many
newspapers and magazines and has been a senior editor for Primedia
Magazine Corporation and for the Weider History Group. He currently
spends half the year in Belize where he sponsors a development project
with the Black Carib families of Hopkins Village. In this essay originally
published in Deer Himting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s
Class War (2007), he reveals the important role that the gun culture
played in forging enduring family connections when he was growing up
in Winchester, Virginia, neat the West Virginia border.
Before You Read
How might growing up in a gun culture provide important life lessons
that might seem strange to outsiders?
————- ♦———–1
,2
3
*
“Take ’em, Joe!” cried-Grandpap as the three deer, a buck and two
does, stretched out at a lope across the ridgeline above us, swift dark
silhouettes against tbe tan buckwheat stubble of what we called^
the ridgefield. My father, “Big Joe,” leaned into the frost-tinged air. k a KRAK, KA-KRAK, JCA-KRAK, KA-KRAK— the sound of each shot was fol
lowed by that rattling echo through the chilled gray woods that every
meat hunter knows and can hear in his sleep. The first deer, the buck,
was thrown sideways by the impact and went down at a runrung roll.
The two does did approximately the same thing; the second one would
later be foimd after an hour of tracking the blood on fences and grass.
We had just witnessed an amazing feat still talked about in the Bageant
family all these years after my father’s death.
That was in the late fall of 1957.1 had been allowed to go with the
deer hunters for the first time, and already I had seen family history
made. Dad had stepped into family folklore, become one of those to be
talked about for generations in a family of hunters, mentioned in the
same breath with old Jim Bageant, who shot a whole washtub full of
squirrels one November morning just before World War II.
These men—Daddy, Grandpap, and two of my uncles. Uncle Toad
and Uncle Nelson—were meat hunters who trudged the fields and
woods together right up xintil the day they got too crippled up to do it
32
THE FAMILY IN DIFFERENT CULTURES
or died. Arid it was because they were meat hunters that they let my
dad take the three deer, one each on their tags, on the last legal day of
hunting season. Everyone knew that my dad, the best shot in the fam• ily, had the most likelihood of getting more than one of th6 deer.
4
Later in the day, after dressing the deer and hanging them on the
rack porch to chill’, we sat around the living-room woodstove, cleaned
the guns, and talked about the day’s hunt. To an eleven-year-old boy,
the smell of gun oil and the stove’s searing raw heat on the face, the
polishing of blued steel and walnut, the clean raspy feel of the checked
gim grip^, the warm laughter of the men, w ell. . . that’s primal afterthe-himt stuff so deep you can feel the sparks from Celtic yew log fires
and the brush of bearskin leggings on your knees. It has been going on
m this place and on this land for 250 years.
5
I quit hunting years ago, yet this remembered room and the longdead men who inhabited it that day in the fall of ’57 remain for me one
of the truest and fmest places and events on this earthTGuns can have a
place mside aTnan, even rem em jj^d guns in the soul of an arthritic
sixty-year-old old socialist -writenirhe crack of a distant rifle or the
wild meat smell of a deer hanging under a porch lightbulb on a snowy
night still bewitches me with the same mountain-folk animism it did
when I was a boy. And though I have not himted since 1986, the sight
of a fine old shotgun still rouses my heart.
6
In families like mine, men are born smelling of gim oil amid a forest
o hrearms. The family home, a huge old clapboard farmhouse, was
stuffed with guns, maybe thirty in all. There were 10-, 12-, 14-, and 20gauge shotguns, pump guns, over-and-unders, and deer rifles of every
imaginable sort from classic Winchester 94 models to 30-ought-sixes, an
old cap and ball “horse pistol” dating back to the mid-1800s, and even a
set of dueling pistols that had been in my family since the 1700s. No
hillbffly ever threw a gun away, even when it could no longer be
repaired. And until they stopped working completely, gtms were
endlessly cared for and patched back together. Otherwise they -vveren’t
to be parted with except under the direst circumstances, either on your
deathbed or because you were so broke your cash bounced. For
example, there is one ancestral family gun that my brother Mike did
not inherit—my father’s prized old Ivers and Johnson double-barrel
shotgun, which had been in the family since the turn of the twentieth
century. An out-of-work trucker at Christmastime, Daddy sold it to buy
us kids the standard assortment of Christmas junk so We would not feel
disappointed. I remember a Robert the Robot for me, a tin stove for my
sister, a little red wheelbarrow for my brother, and, of course, toy guns
and holsters. That was in 1952. We still have the photographs, and we
shll lament the loss of that fine old Ivers and Johnson.,
7
Through our early years we boys could not hunt, but we were
allowed to beat rabbits out of the bush for the dogs to chase back
JOE BAGEANT -f Valley of the Gun
33
around to the hunters. With clothes torn in the blackberry thickets and
feet frozen in the winter creeks, faces pricked and bleeding, we rustled
the brush piles. This would be considered child abuse today, but so
would a lot of things we once did. Besides, there ure far fewer boys
hunting nowadays, thanks to computer games and television. Any
way, surviving the brush torture test of manhood earned us the right to
sit aroimd with the men-folk when they told hunting stories—so long
as we kept our mouths shut unless spoken to. It was then we learned
the family lore, who did what back when and with which gxm.- This
imbued each gim with a sense of ancestry, made us feel part of a long
and unbroken chain of men, a history we would cpntemplate over
decades of seasons during that long patient waiting game that makes
up most of successful hunting—or getting skunked.
After a couple more years came a day when they let us help clean
the guns, running oil-soaked patches down the barrels and polishing
the istocks and metalwork self-consciously under the eyes of grand
fathers, fathers, and uncles, our mouths set serious and every move as
careful as if each gun were made4)f dynamite, trying to demonstrate
that we respected their .destructive capability enough to be trusted
with one. Then the mighty time came when Pap would pull the small
22-caliber “cat rifle” down from the bedroom wall to begin real target
practice, along with what would today be called gun-safety training,
though it was more instinct and common …
Purchase answer to see full
attachment
We can help you complete this assignment or another one similar to this. Just hit "Order Now" to get started!
