Myths and heroes: how the myths can represent aspects of the story of the United States?

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The second document is a song from Bruce Springsteen called American Land. Through this song, he evokes the thoughts and aspirations of a young immigrant who sees America as a land of home. The narrator is a young adult who have a girlfriend. His aim for the future is to settle down in the United States. Moreover, he wants to live the American dream. And for him, every American can live in luxury, abundance and wealth. We can notice it : «Over their all the woman wear silk and satin to their knee». According to the author, the United States is a paradise for workers, a kind of Eldorado. He thinks it’s a land of opportunity. We can see it in line 28 : «There’s treasure for the taking, for any hard working man». The narrator says that America welcomes everyone, regardless of religion, nationality, or social class. He come from a small village and arrived in New York city. So he feels amazement, surprise and fascination towards this city and this country that seems to be perfect. The reason why people emigrating is that they thinks that America is an open society where everybody is on an equal footing. For them, overnight, they can climb the social ladder and become rich even if at the begining they were poor because United Stated is a country without social barrier. They think they can start from scratch and afford expensive materials, something that they couldn’t do before. Futhermore, he said that the workers are the founders of this city and they died by building it. Because they lived in dire straits with a very low income. They were destitute, without better prospects. Their goal was to achieve success. The narrator says that the situation of immigrants is still the same, they take risk to emigrate to the US because of the power of attraction of the American dream. Indeed, there was an important wave of immigration and almost all were part of working class, the blue collars. In this song, Bruce Springsteen praise United States but he is aware of the difficulties of the working class. We can established a link with the notion, Spaces and Exchange because this document evokes the immigration in the United States. Indeed, the flows person is a kind of exchange because this people bring their culture and knowledge in a new country. I chose this song because I like Bruce Springsteen and I think it’s more fun and less academic. Moreover, this document bring to us an immigrant’s point of view, so subjective.

To conclude, we can consider that the globalization have a massive role in terms of exchange. Indeed, thanks to new tool such as internet, the knowledge and culture for example can be share all around the world in a very short time. The actors of this globalization are the states, the government who allow or not the share and the different kind of exchange or the social network. Nowadays, the working condition evolvet. However, this phenomenon have some positive and negative impact. The North is favored due to its advanced development unlike the South. This is why people from the South try to reach the North for live a better life and improve their way of life. Unfortunately, this country can not support these waves of immigration.

Places and forms of power

I’m going to talk about the notion of spaces and exchanges. Exchanges or flows can be a continuous movement or circulation, all types of exchanges (people, trade, media...) for example between poor and richcountries ; or also a general tendency, especially related to work.

This notion invites us to think about this question : What is the power of money ?

The first document, «Money », is a poem by Benjamin Zephaniak, a famous British dub-poet. This poem deals with the power of money and addresses to poor and uneducated people. In the first part, the author speak about the effects of money on people, he say that money make people feel superior, scornful and boastful. Richpeople become vain, superficial, selfish, and greedy. On the contrary, he say poor people are rejected, put asideand feel inferior, depressed. So according to him money is the root of all evil : it triggers problems in society,people with money live an artificial life with wrong values. In the second part, he talks about the consequences inthe 3rd world. He thinks that if money is shared equally, everyone can be happy because food is the most importantthing to live and people should concentrate on the bare necessities. People from emerging countries are the first victims of people’s greed and the poet says that politicians and spies are responsible for the situation and conspire to make to poor poorer. In the last part, he talks about the reasons for this situation and say globalization and capitalism are the causes of these problems, there is an economic war between the North and the South. He uses words belonging to the lexical field of violence like “kills”, “war”, and “shots”. In conclusion, this poem says that they are too many differences between the poor and the rich because of money. In this situation they is noexchange between them. Money creates a two-tier society where the haves and the have-nots are opposed.However, money is originally meant to facilitate exchanges : the problem comes from the fact that money iscurrently kept by the minority. This poem raises the question of the use of money and the relation between people.

Then, in the cartoon “Feed the world” by Banksy, we can see a couple of obese and wealthy Westerners dragged by a skinny black child. They may be on holidays in a poor emerging country : this picture alludes to mass tourism and especially to “slum tourism”. The rich couple is drawn with colors whereas the child and the cart are in grey, so we feel like the cartoonist wants to show that the couple isn’t in the right environment and that they are riches in a poor land. He points to the double-edged problems of this tourism : it is beneficial for the economy butit favors child labor.

The last document : “Nighthawks” is an extract from “The Flat World”, which refers to globalization, byThomas L. Friedman. It is a letter written by Bill Brody, an American former radiologist who is now the dean of amedicine university, to Friedman. The narrator explains a new trend in medicine : American radiologists outsourcetheir work to India and to Australia. Since they use teleradiology, they can have their scans read by Indian or Australian doctors when they don’t have enough staff. They resort to outsourcing when it is nighttime in the US (it’s then daytime in India and Australia), that’s why Indian and Australian doctor are called nighthawks. It enable themto have a quicker diagnosis, moreover, doctors don’t have to do night shifts (work at night) anymore, and thenhospital can