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Mogil 1 To: Professor Mark Wallace Professor Yuan Yuan Professor Dawn Formo From: Blaine H. Mogil Date: April 25, 2014 Rip Van Winkle in the Twenty-first Century Part I The year was 2013, and it was on the dark evening of the sixth day of November. I was driving with the windows down—the cool night air washing over my face—and after a year of reading, researching and writing, I had an epiphany. The creative story that follows had finally been fully drafted the week before, and now it struck me—the story written unwittingly draws heavily from issues that have troubled me about American politics, American history, and the vanishing freedoms and personal liberties here in the United States. The story that follows is not my story, but one that traces its origins back to my awakening from a political and intellectual slumber on September 11, 2001. I was born in a dominantly white, middle class neighborhood into a highly conservative Republican family in which acceptance of the status quo was not only a norm, but an aspirational ideal seen as an essential milestone in achieving the American Dream. Thinking wasn’t discouraged, but thinking progressively, thinking creatively, thinking counter to any accepted Mogil 2 norm was radical and was to be avoided at all costs or else the communist dominoes would be unleashed, toppling the American way of life and unraveling the very fabric of American culture. It was in this state of inculcation as a privileged white, middle-class American male that I remained passively for my first forty-three years. Along the way I picked up one true friend, ironically a subversive, left wing, progressive liberal with whom I argued relentlessly and often. It was the foundation of our friendship—we could argue and still and be great friends. My best friend Mike tried to convert me with his ideas about social justice, equality of opportunity and the importance of unions in protecting the welfare of the working class from the greedy, profit minded capitalists. And while my heart knew his radical ideologies were driven by a progressive desire to improve the greater good of the nation, my will had been forged in the fires of the Cold War. I had been indoctrinated as a staunch defender of the status quo. My defense of the status quo began to melt away when I got an unexpected call from my sister-in-law, early on the morning of September 11, 2001. While the news she shared about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center struck me as unbelievable, it was also too creatively far-fetched for her to fabricate. By the time I got to the office half an hour later and confirmed the horrific news, I called my wife to share the what I had learned, and voice my fear that we (the United States) would be going to war, and how a potential military action might possibly be against a country or organization who had nothing to do with the attack. As to whom the administration would make the scapegoat for the attack, I could not guess. I feared how those in the administration would spin this heinous attack, who they would blame, and how they would go after them guns a-blazing. Perhaps I was stereotyping President Bush and his administration. I was still a staunch Republican. However, President Bush’s political approach to conflict resolution reminded me of old Wild West movies when the new sheriff and his posse arrive in Mogil 3 town with loaded guns and itchy trigger fingers. Further, his impatient unwillingness to wait for a diligent investigation into the events on September 11, 2001, along with his reckless approach to consider any larger issues that led to the attacks, caused me to reconsider my allegiance to the party. My belief that the United States was about to become embroiled in an unjust war was, sadly, the most prescient moment in my life. President Bush made a quick move to war, without waiting for formal congressional approval. His divide and conquer approach to winning support for his war against Iraq, a once staunch American ally in the Middle East, was elucidated clearly in his post-9/11 speech on November 6, 2001, in which he announced, “You’re either with us or against us.” This message carried a warning to not only our enemies, but to our allies, to the legislative branch of the United States government and to the American people. This statement signaled to all, a forthcoming, overreaching increase in government power which would soon be granted by the Patriot Act, which decisively and negatively impacted First Amendment rights by tearing down privacy laws, impeding free speech and casting aside habeas corpus. I was now driven to go beyond the news to find answers as to what caused the perpetrators to strike against us, as well as what motivated our leaders to invade and bomb Iraq. I ended up reading dozens of books on the attacks from various expert sources. I also headed back to school, knowing that I needed to improve my intellectual knowledgebase, and expand my available research tools and critical thinking skills to better understand the sometimes senseless world in which we all live. I had no idea where to focus my studies. My Mira Costa College English 200 professor shone a light on both my academic and career paths with a comment on my final essay. This essay was a short treatise on the United States Empire titled “Divided We Stand, United We Mogil 4 Fall.” The professor gave me the highest possible score for the essay and added the comment, “I can’t wait to read your published work.” That was the moment I knew that writing would be central to my future career. After transferring to California State University, San Marcos, as a literature and writing major, several faculty members encouraged me to pursue teaching in the field, much as my wife had been doing for some time. I had my confidence sufficiently bolstered in the master’s program to pursue teaching in the field of rhetoric and composition. It is this potential future as a teacher that has become one of the central foci for this thesis. Although I have travelled many roads in order to find my way to a thesis that best reflects my passions, and speaks to the future I envision for myself, my inspiration was found in our shared national past. The inspiration that sparked this thesis arose from a re-reading of Washington Irving’s classic American tale of “Rip Van Winkle.” I sought to re-imagine Rip Van Winkle’s odyssey in the modern era in order to share my concerns about history and politics, and bring these concerns to light in a college composition classroom. The idea of using the original tale, and the following fictional journey of Rip’s grandson, to teach composition students inspired new thoughts on pedagogical approaches to teaching in the twenty-first century college composition classroom. I imagined these, or similar texts, as one component in building a cooperative learning community, one that can blur traditional disciplinary boundaries. By simultaneously teaching a shared text in multiple courses such as history, philosophy, sociology, political science or more, there is a potential to improve the learning experience for students and better prepare them for careers in the highly competitive twenty-first century global economy. I read Washington Irving’s tale of “Rip Van Winkle” again, for the first time since President Nixon was sworn into office. The story was suggested to me by one of my professors. Mogil 5 It was a great lead. I took a quick read, and in only a day I found many of the themes I wanted to explore in this thesis, particularly those of a political and a historical nature. I found the story itself was rich in thematic threads, character development, and a blend of history and fantasy (which is what I feel politicians and historians have too often done). The wealth of thematic threads caused me to pause and consider the potential for incorporating the tale into a cross- disciplinary learning environment. I found that the story moved quickly (good for the modern student’s short attention span), and it was enchanting (good for engaging students). It was from this fresh reading that I knew my thesis would, somehow, revolve around the classic Washington Irving tale. My recent reading of “Rip Van Winkle” was in preparation for a new career as a college rhetoric and composition instructor. With my now greater breadth of life experience and the depth of knowledge gained from my scholastic work in the field of literature, the story appeared very little like the child’s tale I recalled through the foggy lens of nostalgia. While considering the story through various critical lenses, there came to light a broad range of thematic threads within the densely packed tale, including threads of politics, history, meta-history, capitalist economics, folklore, myth, sociology, epistemology and more. Bridge to the Creative I was struck by the manner in which Washington Irving created such a rich story, with so many varied thematic threads, which provides the reader with myriad ways to examine the text. I wondered what Washington Irving would have written had he lived in our era. Yet, no matter how much research I did on the man, on his work, on his politics, or on his career, I knew that Mogil 6 imagining how he would view modern America would prove fruitless.

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