Reverse Psychology

Have you ever read though a book on diversity and thought, "What a load of crap?" I know I have because that's often the way it is.

Text books show a person who's awful and seems biggoted in a story without analyzing where that person comes from, or why they say and do the things that they do. More importantly they don't ask the question, "What is this person really thinking?"

In my text book for english class, I read a story by John Cheever called Reunion. In the story a man meets up with his father after not seeing him for many years and by the end of it he walks away from his father, calling him daddy (obviously a term of endearment) and saying, "...and that was the last time I ever saw my father."

For those of you who don't know the story read it! but it sufices to say that the father is an arrogant, stuck up, rich club owning, son of a bitch. He talks in italian at a new york Italian restaurante thinking that they should all know Italian, he talks in a brittish accent and claims he's in Brittain at an english pub and the question at the end of the chapter then becomes, "How would you characterize his father's attitude toward those of other nationalities and different social classes?"

I'm not protesting that this isn't a valid question because his father is a bit classist and racist but they miss the real character deep inside this man and ignore the fact that he hasn't seen his son in three years. They ignore questions like, "do you think his acting out could be a result of his not knowing how to act in front of his son?" or "do you think he feels inadequate because he couldn't take care of his sons mother and that's why she divorced him and so he acts tough and large in front of his son out of an inferiority complex?"

The point is, these things are easy to spot if you're a reader and/or a writer, but if you're a text book author, poorly analyzing too many stories at once, you tend to miss details and the beauty of stories is lost on your overanalyzing minds or underanalyzing minds, I can't tell.

These are the people we choose to write the books that we learn from. Good job America, insensitive in your sensitivity, as always.