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Samuel James Conroy

Gill Chreia

Chreia Progymnasmata

            A.A. Gill provides a divisive piece titled, “America the Marvelous,” in which he describes why America is better than Europe. Gill himself is British so he is not writing this as an American praising America. The article goes into why America is better than Europe through Gill’s life experiences. The piece starts off with Gill recounting a time where he was at an elite liberal dinner party in Europe and a woman at the dinner was desecrating America. She would say, “Stupid, stupid. Americans are stupid. America is stupid. A stupid, stupid country made stupid by stupid, stupid people” (Gill). This is a common take among Europeans, that America is uneducated, loud, annoying, spoiled etc… However, Gill disagrees with this. He believes that America is everything Europe wishes it was, and that the sly remarks are mere jealousy. He backs up his claims by providing evidence of America’s successes, such as having 14 out of the top 20 schools in the world, winning more Nobel prizes than Germany, France, Britain, Japan, and Russia combined, and having 22 peace prized with 12 being for literature.

This is another common diss at America that our literature is not intellectual. Gill states, “It was Camus who sniffily said that only in America could you be a novelist without being an intellectual” (Gill). This attack is misguided as in America, writing is much more straight-forward and plain, there is not a hidden meaning behind every writing that needs to be solved. This is no way means that the writing is of lower quality, it is just simpler to understand. Gill then goes through America’s sudden rise to becoming a world power, and that those who contributed went to America as they knew it was better than the old world.

Gill’s thoughts obviously clash with just about everyone who is not American, however, his evidence more than backs up his claims. He ends the piece with a fantastic jab at Europeans, he states:

“There is in Europe another popular snobbery, about the parochialism of America, the unsophistication of its taste, the limit of its inquiry. This, we’re told, is proved by “how few Americans travel abroad.” Apparently, so we’re told, only 35 percent of Americans have passports. Whenever I hear this, I always think, My good golly gosh, really? That many? Why would you go anywhere else? There is so much of America to wonder at. So much that is the miracle of a newly minted civilization. And anyway, European kids only get passports because they all want to go to New York” (Gill).

This bit of banter is a brilliant way to conclude the piece in stating that the reason Americans do not leave America is because why would they? It is better than anywhere else and that Europeans who travel just come to America anyways.

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Ehren Joseph Layne

Response to A.A. Gill’s “America the Marvelous”

It’s always disappointing to read pieces of literature by great authors who – disappointingly – are unforgivingly white. I have no problem with white authors (except for J.D. Salinger – you know why) and often praise them for their whit, eloquent speech, and disorienting allusions: authors like Thomas Moore, Marie de France, and Homer. As much as I appreciate white literature (white American and white European I use interchangeably)  and understand it to be the norm (albeit forcefully) for intellectual discourse, I can’t forgive white authors for being the very thing they are: white. 

A.A. Gill in his piece “America the Marvelous” argues that Europeans are hypocritical normies who purposefully refute the greatness of America to make themselves feel more superior. He strings together various reasons for why America is so great: the US has some of the best universities in the world, the most Nobel prize winners, and New York City. For all of these reasons, Gill confirms that Europeans only ridicule Americans out of their own self-pity and need for a farce to indulge themselves in the benefits of insults. A.A. Gill paints this marvelous image of America, one of an idealistic, diverse, complicated, cosmopolitan country; in Gill’s eyes, once you’ve stepped foot in America, you’ll never want to leave. You’ll be pulled in by America’s greatness and would dread the idea of returning to Europe, Africa – wherever you may be from. This is Gill’s argument, for his animosity towards our European counterparts has grown so great that he believes throwing insults back at them is the best way to find common ground; and although Gill never says it openly, I –  as I imagine most black, Asian, Hispanic people would – understood exactly what Gill really wants to say. Behind all this misplaced anger, Gill was just bragging about being white. All he did was talk about white people: who they are and what they’ve done, although he did gloss over a few things:  slavery, redlining, COINTELPRO, Jim Crow, Vietnam war, war on drugs, Cuban Missle Crisis, segregation, Japanese internment camps, the KKK, the Proud Boys, mass shootings, Native American genocide, Richard Nixon, the South, Chinese Exclusion Act, Guantanamo Bay, the My Lai Massacre, Emmett Till’s murder, the Wilmington coup (seriously, look this up), the Sand Creek Massacre, Santa Barbara Oil Spill, smallpox, neo-nazis, police brutality, Executive order 10450 (look this up too), Operation Wetback, Dredd Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the death of Treyvon Martin. But I guess none of this matters to A.A. Gill because he got to sing Be Bop a Lula (a song I have never heard as an American) in front of and with other white people. It’s almost sickening once you’ve realized what A.A. Gill has done: he’s made America into an oasis by distinguishing it from Europe, but still using Europe as the starting point of American culture, and by accentuating a few good outcomes over years and years of negative ones. I should mention again, Gill can only write in such a way because he is white; his argument and reasons for arguing are white noise to any person who isn’t white. He’s just another patriotic American white guy who has no shame, urges others to only look at the good, and abuses his whiteness so take bring himself above not only Europeans (who are also white), but anybody who isn’t also white (I use white a lot in this piece and I hope you understand why by now). Gill is just shouting into a white void – he’s furiously screaming at our European counterparts to understand how their history and ours are linked, and that we came out the better nation in the end. He condemns their snobbery, hypocrisy, and self-indulgence, all of which – I can logically assume – makes him feel like the bigger, better white guy. I don’t know A.A. Gill personally, so what I’m saying might come off as defacement; most readers would assume I’m any angry black guy lashing out on “white oppressors.” To an extent, that is true, but I assure you I am doing more than that.

 

I am trying to paint a picture of America as a whole,  not the bits and pieces Gill uses to develop his argument. America needs to be seen, in any light, by the good and the bad, they cannot exist without one another. Too often white authors only paint the picture of white America (even though Gill mentions Jazz which set me off), completely omitting the history of non-white Americans. If Gill and any other white American wishes to uplift America as this utopian-esque society with still more room to grow, they must also mention what is weighing America down: all the bigotry, hate, narcissism, and history that comes with being an American. Say what you will about Europeans: their accents suck (this is a joke for I am quite fond of British, French, and Spanish accents), most of them never reach 5’10, and they’re all stuck in the past. As bad as all this may seem, America is no better, and rather than pointing fingers, we should focus our energies on doing and being better; the first step, admitting to yourself Mr. Gill that you are white, and you have privilege.

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Lucas Enrique Fernandez

America With Love

Thesis or Theme:

Interestingly, the “land of the free” where people are supposed to flock if they want to live the American Dream…does not have the best reputation. People abroad can insult the United States out loud and the people in the surrounding area would just mumble in agreement. In A.A. Gill’s America With Love he challenges this natural instinct to bandwagon the stigma the US has built. Gill pushes back on his fellow Europeans snarky, sometimes incorrect comments with factual accomplishments from the nation.

Well, how stupid can America actually be? On the international list of the world’s best universities, 14 of the top 20 are American. Four are British. Of the top 100, only 4 are French, and Heidelberg is one of 4 that creeps in for the Germans. America has won 338 Nobel Prizes. The U.K., 119. France, 59. America has more Nobel Prizes than Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia combined.

Not only does he do this but he also throws the hypocrisy of Europeans back at them. The people complaining about America will do so leaving the movie theater where they watched an Avengers movie while listening to Travis Scott. In short, if you are enjoying American culture, inventions, and practices then you should not act like they are lesser than you.

In the second half of his article, Gill asserts that the main reason people hate the United States is because of how similar they are but how successful the US has become. The United States came from Europe, its culture is etched across many places and disciplines in the US. However, while Britain had declined during the 20th century, for example, the US became stronger than ever, using the World Wars to drag itself out of the Great Depression. In the short lifespan the country has had, it has become a global superpower and a resounding success story. In the end, Gill praises the United States for doing this and even berates himself for formerly agreeing with the notion of these other Europeans.

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Aongus Mui

Fifty Shades of Greyhound- Harrison Scott Key Progym: Comparison

Fifty Shades of Greyhound- Harrison Scott Key
Progym: Comparison

Apart from the obvious fact that planes fly and busses travel on the road, there are still meny keen differences between the two. As Harrison Scott Key States “Bus People are nothing like Airplane People, who are boring and have luggage and enjoy skiing. Bus People, on the other hand, enjoy talking about grenades and screaming.” (Key) On airplanes there are flight attendants constantly attending to you, offering you snacks and drinks, assisting you with your every need. On busses it’s just you and the strangers around you, there is no attendant to help you with anything. Another thing Key mentions is “On an airplane, an empty seat is a small miracle, a sacred place to set one’s book. On a bus, though, the empty seat invites lurid napping positions that resemble the attitudes of those who’ve been buried in lava and discovered many years later.” (Key) The mindset of the people riding on planes versus the mindset of bus riders is different. Planes offer more of a luxurious feel than busses do. Plane tickets provide you with an assigned seat whereas busses are first come first serve. There is an overall different vibe between the two forms of transportation.

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Paula I Arraiza

Greyhound Strangers

Progym: Impersonation

“These were my thoughts as I looked at the other passengers and noted a woman wearing a bologna sandwich on her head. Was there really a bologna sandwich on her head? Yes, unmistakably. Also, she wore a blue Snuggie.” (in Savannah)

(from the woman’s point of view)

As time passed on my extremely long journey to God-knows-where, I felt myself begin to go more and more crazy. Being confined to buses for long days and nights, with nowhere to sleep comfortably or any real food has definitely taken a toll on me. At this point in the journey, I do not care how I act or what I eat or what I’m wearing, or who around me is judging me. As my stomach growled from extreme hunger, caused by consuming sugar-filled snacks and a tremendous amount of gas station coffee for days on end, I saw my salvation coming near me: a sandwich shop. I couldn’t believe what my eyes were seeing, I was so sleep deprived I could’ve cried from happiness. I skipped down the bus stairs like a kid coming down a bus to go into Disney World for the first time. With my blue Snuggie on for maximum comfort and not a care in the world, I went into this random sandwich shop to buy what felt like a gourmet meal. For some reason, my stomach decided it was craving bologna, so I obeyed and ordered a bologna sandwich. I happily walked my way back to the bus, which would hold me captive for a few more days before I reached my destination. I sat down on a random chair and decided, for some unknown reason except my craziness from this bus, to see how people would react if I held my beloved sandwich on top of my head. I got many odd looks, which were completely valid, but it was a fun time for me. At least I have this delicious sandwich and my comfortable Snuggie to keep me company for the rest of my journey.

 

 

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Samuel E Evans

“Fifty Shades of Greyhound,” by Key, “America the Marvelous,” by Gill

Progygm: Vituperation

“The intellectuals, the movers and the makers and the creators, the dinner-party establishments of people who count, are united in the belief—no, the knowledge—that Americans are stupid, crass, ignorant, soul-less, naïve oafs without attention, irony, or intellect,” (Gill para. 2).

Americans are fat, dumb, and lazy. This is a common theory I have heard repeated from countless British relatives and foreign acquaintances over the years, including from my parents, to the point that until I reached some point of teenage maturity or more likely rebellion, I almost accepted it. My parents, grandparents, aunts, nearly everyone will, as a casual aside, as if it goes without saying, remark about how different and inferior the customs, consumerism, mannerisms, and attitudes of the American populace are to those of Britain or Europe.

This attitude is, without a doubt, snooty and self-aggrandizing. It is unfounded, and hilariously quite hypocritical, as oftentimes those same people will be as ready to note the flaws and recent failures of their own cultures. My dad, for example, upon returning home to England will immediately complain about how uptight people are, and how every parking garage, supermarket, and public restroom in his homeland seems to be trying to rip him off. My relatives simply act this way because it is the common farse under which Europe, fading in relevance, reassures itself of its importance.

Britain, once a bastion of global power and wealth, has now been reduced to its current, and possibly righteous position as just another indebted neoliberal democracy on the edge of the continent. With this decline and adaptation, however, the attitude towards its now full-grown daughter across the pond has not changed. This attitude was taught to each generation of British youth through to the ’90s, alongside a heaping pile of imperial glorification and denial. In the end, it’s not their fault that they’re wrong, as the realization that they are in fact believing a lie can be somewhat depressing, as seen in a plethora of modern British media. I, as a dual citizen and someone who has been educated from an entirely different perspective, can see the reality and humor of it. I’ll argue with my parents over it, but beyond that, it appears a lost cause.

This kind of denial is common to many former powers, it seems. Look at the French, who go to the bizarre trouble of “preserving the quality” of their language through the Académie Française, or the Dutch who are the literal kings of holding onto random overseas colonies. When you’re used to being on top, you like to pretend it’s still that way by criticizing the new and reminiscing about the old. America is not dumb, fat, and lazy, it is amazingly weird, clever, and diverse. Just because America doesn’t present its gifts of knowledge and culture wearing up in a suit and tie, that doesn’t mean the gifts aren’t there to be given. There is a reason that immigrants and travelers from the Old World have flocked to the New for centuries, in search of a Hunter S. Thompson-esque Wild West of opportunity. As Harrison Scott Key writes about his learning about America by traveling by the joyous mode of a Greyhound bus:

“They will remember only the people and the America it showed them and the wild and reckless reasons that drove them to it: to see a girl, or a headstone, or a mountain. And they will recall it fondly, as I do now,” (Key para. 63).

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Catherine Dodd Corona

Cardell and Douglas

Selfies

Progymnasmata: Comparison

Cardell works through the reasoning, popularity of the selfies and how it pertains to travel. She emphasized the premeditation people put into their selfies and why there is so much thought behind it. She stats that, “Selfie-takers are routinely pathologised as vain and narcissistic, a simplistic con- struction that critics have increasingly begun to complicate (Rettberg 2014; Senft and Baym 2015; Warfield 2014).” Even though a person taking a  selfie is not always a way of bragging and living a life for an audience many people have clinged onto that vain aspect of a selfie taking. Cardell works to dive into the self fulfilling fasist of selfie taking through academic writing while another women does it through art. Stephanie Leigh in an interview with Insider states that selfies in her opinion are ““bragging” in the context of “I was here”.” (Millington, 2019) Therefore Leigh create “Stedfies” a form of anti selfies. When she finds herself at a picture worthy landmark, she lays on the ground as if she were dead and has someone take a photo. It does not fit the typical selfie template but the media and society has deemed them as such. The message Leigh sends with her anti selfies is quite different from what Cardell defines as a selfie. Leigh’s art building on the vain themes Cardell discusses, especially with Leigh’s message being, “It is my hope STEFDIES promotes the idea of ‘everyone is perfect exactly how they are, and not a damn thing has to be changed,'” she said “Don’t wait for the perfect time or the perfect shot — just be you, and that is good enough, and at the end of the day, incredibly interesting.”(Millington, 2019). Her followers eco this message by saying, “Many school groups follow the STEFDIES series, as they consider it a good tool to teach young adults there are alternatives to the perfectionism of selfies and online culture,” she said. “STEFDIES welcomes everyone to participate, and doesn’t care about about status or perfection.”(Millington, 2019).

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Phillip Wade Wilson

Selfie and the way of the influencer: Commonplace

“much of the negativity that surrounds social media and selfies can be contextualised within broader cultures of youth shaming”

Something that I found lacking in this article was the way in which Cardell and Douglas, perhaps, do not fully understand social media from the aspects of Gen-Z. Specifically, I want to highlight the fact that in my generation we grew up using all of these technologies and being exposed to the world at such a young age that had never been seen before. This came at the extent to which parents had difficulties monitoring their children’s internet behavior and many many parenting guides about online behavior came about but none captured what they should have. I remember as a child seeing things I should not have seen, going to sites that I should not have been going to, and having giggles or conversations with my friends at the age of 10 that I definitely was not ready for. Though, these parenting guides on monitoring online behavior were about children texting using codes or acronyms or sending naked pictures back and forth between each other… from experience growing up this was not the issue.

What the selfie and explosion of social media gave to children were lasting internalized traumas of being lesser than or not good enough based on the posts we were seeing from influential figures. I remember opening up Instagram in high school and seeing models and fashion and wealthy people showing me how I ought to live because this is what I should be striving for. Differences were not accepted and even so, in the creation of one of the newest social media platforms, TikTok, its algorithm for who would become a star was based on eurocentric, petit, and wealthy models. Time and time again has it been accused that algorithms created by Big Tech are made with such inherent bias that many are left out and unable to fully join in and interact with the global online community.

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Jack Albert Nusenow

The Selfie, New and Old Travel Writing

Progym: ekphrasis, argument

While it seems to be getting less and less stylish to take and share selfies, in actuality, my sense is that no one has slowed down. The first accusation in conversations about selfies is their vanity. Critiques of selfies is an artistic sense often rely on this quality as a means of attacking selfies’ potential to be rhetorical in some way. This extends to selfies as a form of travel writing. The first sentence in the introduction of Kylie Cardell & Kate Douglas’s essay on selfies as travel writing immediately brought to my mind a famous picture.

At 23, Beatles' lead guitarist George Harrison clicked an iconic selfie at the Taj Mahal during his 1966 India visit

George Harrison, at 23, standing in front of the calm, shallow pool that reflects the memorial’s figure feels anything but vain. The fisheye selfie features the Taj Mahal as the one point perspective with reverence, not vanity. It highlights Agra’s beautiful greenery and their vibrant blue sky. If travel writing’s “purpose” (if it has only one) is to spur curiosity and inspire travel, this picture, for me, is a perfect form of travel writing. It says more without words than most stories could, while leaving mystery to provoke a serious desire to visit the Taj Mahal.

If Cardell and Douglas are right, and selfies are indeed on the forefront of travel writing, they’re nothing new. They’ve only been made ubiquitous.

 

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Nathan Ryan Reeves

The Selfie as Travel Writing-Thesis/Theme

The selfie is an unconventional way to travel writing, and I’d say that compared to traditional writing they develop the same feeling to the viewer, but with different avenues. Travel writing displays the destination through words and descriptive phrases. With selfies in travel writing, the main focal point is not the person but rather the vacation or destination around them. Selfies have their pros and cons to traditional writing, but both aim to accomplish the same thing, displaying travel through a medium that can invoke inspiration.

For instance, in the reading “Visualizing lives: “the selfie” as travel writing, Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas discuss the differences between travel writing and selfies as travel writing. There are some problems with the use of this form of travel expression, but overall, the paper revolves around the context of travel posts on Instagram.

One important point that I think could be at the forefront of their arguments was the context of taking selfies, and whether travel writing in the form of selfies is appropriate. There is this famous case of a girl named Breanna Mitchell, who took a selfie when she was at Auschwitz and posted it on Twitter and other social media. The internet exploded since this kind of selfie was disrespectful, and self-centered. Using this example, there seem to be unspoken rules around the form of travel selfies in accordance to not disrespect where you are. The centralism involved with selfies makes the person seem self-centered in a place that is not meant for that. In that, the authors imply that there is an appropriate way to post about these sensitive topics. In my opinion, I feel that the selfie has been around for so long that it should be expected that people would know the appropriate times and not at a place where there were human atrocities, but rather taking selfies at a place where you can appropriately express the place you are visiting. If the place is touchy and means something to you directly, the authors have stated that there are other ways to document it, that are not selfies.

All in all, the selfie is a good tool at the appropriate time to display appreciation for the location you are visiting, however, there are these unspoken rules that people should be aware of for the sake of respect. The form of memorialization is a clear-cut thing to sway from when possible. However, this contemporary documentation can create interesting travel narratives, when done correctly.