Freshman Monroe Summer Projects

This is the BONUS fourth post. Just wanted to wrap up the long and complex story. So the last time we left off, it was March 24, 2008 and Bear Sterns was just bought by JP Morgan for $10 a share. To set the stage, Tibetan Protests were just getting violent with the Olympics months ahead, Barack Obama is still three months away from clinching the primary, and Pennsylvania is still weeks away. Fast forward a few months to mid July. If you recall, for the past several years there was an active and premeditated effort on the part of Wall Street lenders to cut into the market share of the government mortgage lenders, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (“Freddie Mac”) and Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae). By 2008, these two organizations either owned or had acquired the risk of 6 trillion dollars worth of American mortgages, around half of the entire market. As you might imagine, this made them very exposed to the housing market, and when the value of the American home started decreasing for the first time in several generations, FMAC and FMNA felt it more then investment banks who had other investments.

And around mid July 2008 Henry Paulson saw that there was another crisis of confidence on the horizon and, recognizing that if anything were to happen to either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, Half of American homeowners still paying back their mortgages would be in hot water very quickly. All of a sudden both stocks go down around 60%. So Paulson requests congress that, if it gets bad enough, He and the Treasury have the ability to place FMAC and FMNA under Government Conservatorship. So right then, FMAC and FMNA’s problem goes from “How do we get our Stocks Up?” to “How can we stop Hemorrhaging money?” And the answer to that is to go to investors.

The investors, however, are in a quandary. Many of the people who invested in Bear when they were in a similar position lost their shirts when they received cents on the dollar after the sale to JP Morgan. This was still very, very fresh in the mind of investors. So Investors told Dan Mudd, the head of Fannie Mae, that when the government says they’re not going to take you over we’ll give you our money, but until we get assurances of that, its too risky for us to give you anything. So there’s no inflow of capital into either company. And the treasury has stalled and is unwilling to give any indication either way. So the two companies are in limbo.

So then, having scared away potential investors and now forced to resort to his last ditch option, Paulson informs the Boards of FMAC and FMNA that the Treasury has bought 80% of their stock, that the CEO and Boards are out, and that Treasury selected Boards and CEO are in. There are two ways of looking at this. One end suggests that it was completely necessary for the survival of the American economy, which has some heavy validity to it; The 6 trillion under control of the two companies is essentially the bedrock of mortgages in this country, and theyre seen almost as secure as US Treasury Bonds. Capital markets would have seized up and the Global economy would have basically suffered a stroke if anything happened to Freddie and Fannie. The other viewpoint is that, had FMAC and FMNA not gone under conservatorship, Lehmen would have been able to get enough capital to say afloat, but that acknowledging the bad debt just torpedoed that. But that comes next anyway. I personally think that the first analysis is most prudent and least speculative.

The thing to take away from this is that what Paulson saw as a necessary action for the preservation of American capitalism, traders saw as waving a white flag. Consumer confidence wasn’t just low, it was as if Henry Paulson had personally beaten it mercilessly and took its lunch money. So when Lehmen got in trouble, there was no way anyone was going to take a risk, and take any sort of action that wasn’t a B- line for a life boat off of the USS Lehmen.

Understanding what happened to Lehmen Brothers requires understand what exactly Lehmen Brothers specialized in. A major source of income for them was the Prime Broker, where they would handle all of the little, backroom transactions for major hedge funds. It alleviated much of the work for hedge fund managers and was a very, very profitable service Lehmen provided. The issue is, when investors call their hedge fund manager and alert them that they are uncomfortable with Lehmen handling their money, it was a one simple phone call and that’s all it took to have, for instance, Goldman Sachs be your prime broker. And if enough people go scared and called their hedge fund manager, this could lead to a massive hemorrhaging of cash.

On September 5, JP Morgan asked Lehmen for 5 Billion dollars in cash to cover collateral. JP Morgan handled most of Lehmen’s trades, so this put Lehmen in an awkward position. However, Lehmen has larger problems. They needed financing very, very quickly or else they would not be able to stay in business. They had discreetly attempted to secure financing from a laundry list of financial services, including Barclays, Bank of America, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, various kings and royalty in the Middle East, and even Warren Buffet. When their last attempt at courting a Korean Bank to fund them went south, word got out they could not get the cash and their stock dropped 45% in a day on September 9. Lehmen couldn’t secure funding mostly because they would not accept that the mortgage based securities had decreased in value as much as they had in reality, so they asked far too much for something that other companies had settled for a quarter on the dollar. CEO Rick Fuld refused to settle and would not acknowledge the problem, only wasting valuable time that could have been spent negotiating for the salvation of their company.

Within Lehmen Brothers, people are absolutely freaking out. They announce restructuring plans, beg and plead people to stay with them, march on CNBC and announce that everything will be OK, and avoid mentioning the fact they now need 3-5 Billion dollars to stay in business. The Fed wanted absolutely nothing to do with Lehmen, which they saw as a firm actually evaporating in front of them. JP Morgan asks for a additional % Billion dollars in order to finance more collateral in the even of defaulture on the part of Lehmen Brothers. In a twist, it is this very act that causes the defaulture of Lehmen Brothers.

On September 12, the Fed contacts the heads of the major banks on Wall Street and makes it abundantly clear that, because of moral hazard, the Fed will not be bailing out Lehmen Brothers. The fed believe a bailout n this case would send out the message that capitalism does not have consequences. Still hurting from Bear Sterns, the Fed would not open itself up to this big of a risk. Some lawmakers, such as Chair of the House Financial Services Committee Barney Frank, believe that in retrospect saving Lehmen Brothers, while still a moral hazard, would have prevented the domino effect we saw in the upcoming weeks of banks being knocked over left and right. There isn’t a way to tell, but I believe that argument has validity. The Fed simply miscalculated risk.

The next few days, specifically September 16 and 17, are confusing, frenzied, and catastrophic to global economic continuity. AIG was very, very bad. AIG was first and foremost an insurance company. They were turning profits. They are still turning profits. On September 16 their stocks fell 61% and by the afternoon Bernake, after meeting with Paulson, takes 85 Billion out of the 800 Billion dollar Federal Reserve rainy day stash and buys up 80% of AIG to stop the calamitous fall. AIG had simply miscalculated risk. They had issued insurance to people against the failure of Lehmen Brothers, and who could blame them? Lehmen brothers was a secure, storied, and profitable financial institution, and the risk of Lehmen evaporating was similar to the likelihood of a single hurricane leveling Washington DC, New York City, and Boston. It was blindsided. AIG also did not fall under the jurisdiction of the SEC, since decades of ‘deregulation’ had made it so the SEC could not adapt to a changing financial climate, instead stuck in the 1980s. The SEC could not oversee the credit default swaps, the financial insurance, to prevent the failure of AIG.

If all a sudden, out of nowhere, AIG was unable to make good on all of the credit default swaps for Lehmen and every other company who would go down, it would actually lead to the global markets having a stroke. It would mean the failure of the economy on a scale never seen before, not even the depression. Bernake and Paulson know this. On September 17, Bernake tells Paulson that they need a bailout. On September 18, they go to congress and inform them- very, very correctly- if they do not get the money they need the United States of American will not have an economy on Monday. If the banks go down and credit dries up, then this hits every American in the sense that all non cash transactions will not be able to electronically happen.

So at 1:30 in the morning on September 20, Paulson submits a three page bill that asks for $700 Billion, no strings attached, no agency can oversee anything, and no court can do anything. Right now the government is, in simple terms, giving the banks money to compensate for the gaping distance between what a financial service was actually worth in reality and what the Gaussian copula Function implied it was worth. On Septemeber 21 an era ends and the last two surviving investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanly, become bank holding companies and submit themselves to the jurisdiction of the federal reserve. On September 25, the day when WaMu become the largest bank failure in history, President Bush meets with McCain and Obama and Senate and Congressional leaders for a debriefing on the response to the event.

The house, underinformed and having a kneejerk reaction to this plan so close to election season, turns down the plan causing the Dow Jones industrial average to drop seven hundred points on September 29, the largest drop in history. On October 3, the house passes a slightly revised bill which gives the treasury broad authority. Finally, on October 13, Bernake, Geithner, and Paulson meet with the heads of the largest surviving banks informing them that, whether they like it or not, they will all be accepting capital to ensure that markets stabilize. Of the 250 Billion dollars, half is loaned to JPMorgan, Bank of New York Mellon, Merrill Lynch, State Street, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo, and the other half is loaned to a multitude of smaller banks.

I apologize that this post is late. I thought that Petronius was a pretty cut-and-dry case and that his work did simultaneously attack, entertain, and preach, as Niall Rudd believes Roman satire does. However, upon further investigation that delayed me a bit, I discovered that Petronius is not truly preaching in his work: his main character Encolpius, who serves as the narrator, is not a hero, but an anti-hero. The reader then must question everything seen through Encolpius’s point of view. In many cases when Encolpius expresses a view on something, he is in fact being hypocritical. For example, he complains that standards of education have declined due to the emphasis placed on declamation. However, by making a speech in the way he does and in his use of rhetorical devices, he is attacking declamation with declamation! No one in the work escapes attack or ridicule; there are no characters in the work that serve as models of morality.

One thing I learned about doing research is the danger of approaching it with preconceived ideas of what you will find. By expecting to find a didactic element to Petronius’s work, it was all the easier for me to find one when it was not truly there. It was only when I investigated another author’s argument, that there is no moral tone in Petronius’s work, and re-examined the text that I realized the true nature of the Satyricon and its most infamous excerpt, the Dinner of Trimalchio.

Alright— a bit late, but the quick final installment on my Monroe project!

I have finished calculating results… and essentially, I have realized that, in spite of my love-hate relationships with SPSS and Stata (as developped through various Government and Economics classes), I like these statistical software packages much better than other options out there on the market. I used Fathom to run the statistical tests for my project. While Fathom is impressive, it is not necessarily as accessible as the two aforementioned packages and as such made my number-crunching session much longer and more grueling than truly necessary.

Anyway, I won’t waste any more of your time on this entry! I have results, I have statistics, I have tables! To find out more about my data, analyses, and conclusions, you’ll have to read my paper or come visit me at the research fair!

Finally, we come to my conclusion. I’m going to keep it brief, a task that I have failed to complete in my previous posts, but I don’t want to get too into depth with my analysis or I’ll go off the deep end. I’ve got to save something for my actual paper, dudes.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel is a thrilling mystery. It’s worth the read if you’ve never even heard of Spain before, let alone Franco and the falangists, but with a certain amount of background information the novel becomes even more relevant. Daniel Sempere searches for the truth about a novelist in the oppressive atmosphere of Francoist Spain. He is pursued by a villain intent on burning the entire collection of this author’s works. This bears a striking similarity to the reality of Francoist legislation, where only pre-approved books and movies could be published.

The effects of the Civil War are also evident on the characters of Zafón’s novel. Clara Barceló’s father was imprisoned and killed in the castle of Montjuic. The personable homeless man Fermín is literally and mentally scarred from his encounters in a Francoist prison. A gay acquaintance of the Sempere family faces the threat of persecution from the government.

In short, Zafón portrays life under Franco in post-war Barcelona as a place of censorship and fear, filled with shadows and doubts. Without explicitly detailing the legislation of the time, he communicates the oppressiveness of living under such strict regulations.

Well kids, it’s been fun. I would highly recommend that you read this novel. It’s seriously fantastic and I’ll be putting the finishing touches on my paper in the days to come so if you’re interested, let’s chat!

Chao guapos!

So in this post I will attempt to give you a bit of historical background for the setting of The Shadow of the Wind. Please forgive any bias (ok, there’s a lot of bias) that may present itself in this writing; in this informal setting of the blog I’ll probably let loose my own personal opinions a bit more than in my final paper. But here goes:

The Spanish Civil War took place from 1936 to 1969. In 1931, shortly before the world, the reigning king of Spain ceded power to a democratically elected government. A constitution was drafted, affording women the right to vote for the first time in history and requiring a strict separation from church and state. This government has been criticized for indeed being too restrictive of Church affairs, going so far as to prohibit religious instruction even in private schools. Unfortunately, some extremist sects of the left also perpetrated acts of violence against monasteries and the clergy, taking the anticlerical sentiment to a whole new level. This incensed conservative groups even more and, shall we say, certainly didn’t help smooth things over between the left and right, and tensions rose throughout the years following the formation of the new government.

In 1936, a military coup was orchestrated by several high-ups in the Spanish military chain of command, among them General Francisco Franco, second-rate tyrant and overall Hitler wannabe. There ensued a bloody war between two loosely defined sides, each consisting of a broad coalition of a variety of groups. Namely:

-The Republicans (left) consisting of:

• moderates in favor of democracy
• socialists
• Communists supported by the USSR
• Anarchists
• Labor unions
• Separatist groups from the Basque Country, Galicia, and Catalonia
• Largely working class and educated middle class/ intellectuals

-The Nationalists (right) consisting of:

• Monarchists
• the Catholic Church
• Fascists/Francoists (the Falange)
• anti-Communists
• largely upper class landowners or businessmen, as well as practicing Catholics and other social and economic conservatives

Both sides had varied outside support. The Republicans were joined by the “International Brigades,” a selection of foreign communists, anarchists, socialists, and other anti-fascists who voluntarily joined the battle. The Soviet Union also provided manpower, weapons, and leadership to the International Brigades. The Nationalists had allies in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.

In the end, the Francoist Nationalist forces defeated the Republicans despite fierce resistance and Franco assumed dictatorial control over the country. He established an authoritarian state based on conservative principles and granted utmost power and importance to the Catholic Church. Franco ruled from 1939 until his death in 1975, though the strictness and absolute power of the regime loosened somewhat over time.

All that’s just background knowledge; my research was concerned with going into greater depth regarding the censorship and varied restrictions on human rights that took place, especially with regard to Barcelona. This city, in the region of Catalonia, faced special restrictions because of the separate national identity of its people. Franco’s regime outlawed any language other than Spanish, a blow to the Catalan-speaking people of Barcelona, and refused the autonomy that Catalonia had long desired. Furthermore, Barcelona was one of the last bastions of liberalism during the war and continued to produce intellectual resistance to the regime throughout its history.

As I mentioned before, all the documents and books I could find in Barcelona were written in Catalan. In many ways, this is only appropriate: after decades of not being able to speak their own language, Catalan scholars should right about that oppression in Catalan. However, it is somewhat frustrating to a Spanish- speaking researcher like myself. Luckily, I could understand everything I read, but I won’t bother trying to translate here because I certainly couldn’t guarantee any level of accurate or graceful translation.

Here are a few of the most relevant tidbits I read about.  I specifically looked for specific legislation restricting human rights.

• La Llei de Premsa (Press law):  Passed in 1938, this mandated the governmental control of the national newspaper industry.
• The second Llei de Premsa, passed in 1966: Included severe fines for breaches of censorship policy.
• La Llei de <Vagos y Maleantes>: A law passed in 1954 aimed against prostitutes and drunks.
• La Llei de Perillositat i rehabilatació social:  Passed in 1970 and targeting homosexuals.

This is just a sampling of the anti-human rights legislation passed under Franco.  (WHAAAAT??? Legalized discrimination on the basis of sexual preference???  Thank God we live in ‘Merica.)

Next time, (a.k.a. in a couple minutes….) we’ll examine the implications of these laws in Zafón’s novel.  Woot woot!

Over the past few weeks, after changing my focus, I’ve seen examples of Arab music in several different settings.  At the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo, the largest mosque complex in North America, I heard a band consisting of several young Lebanese professionals along with two students of European descent playing traditional Middle Eastern instruments.  They had songs in Arabic, including folk songs and pop songs, and not a single one of the members was a professional musician.  After their performance, I talked with them, and found out that they were simply a group of friends with a shared interest in music and Lebanese culture.  They practiced in living rooms and basically made up the adult version of a garage band, playing when and where they could.  Arab music provided them with a means of exploring their cultural heritage and a release from the stresses of the everyday grind.
While the group I saw was not professional, Arab music has made its way into the American music industry.  The Silk Road Ensemble is a group of about sixty musicians from over twenty countries along the ancient Silk Road.  The idea first took wing at a Tanglewood conference sponsored by cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 2000.  The group not only uses traditional instruments, but they fuse musical traditions from several countries, incorporating Persian modes and quarter tones.  The group also seeks to educate the public about the cultural implications of the Silk Road and the modern issues that have developed in countries including poverty, discrimination, and political tensions within the region.
One song that seems to appear not only in music performed by groups with a recognized Arab influence but also in movie scores, Western classical music, and even pop music is the misirlou.  Found in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, the Black-Eyed Peas’ Pump It, and the soundtracks for several old movies set in “Arabia,” it is one of the most recognized Arab motifs.  This blending of Arab elements into pop culture helps to bring attention to a different musical style, and even helps to promote musical artists from Arab countries.
There’s a term in Arabic, tarab, that seems to fit the attitude of Arab-Americans toward their musical heritage.  Tarab is a state of happiness derived from a pleasant musical experience.  It is achieved not only through the music, but because of the company one shares a musical experience with.  Music is a way for the Arab-American population to come together and celebrate the land that they came from.  While their heritage may blend into the background sometimes, music helps to give a sense of belonging and connection to over 1.2 million Americans.  It provides a means of celebration with family and friends, and helps to preserve a culture for future generations to enjoy.

My project resulted in more research than I could ever have imagined, with each of Austen’s novels opening up a whole new dimension and insight into my efforts. As a result, I narrowed my focus on three of her most relevant works in terms of the Cinderella motif, rather than attempting to tackle all five of her popular novels. I therefore compared primarily “Pride and Prejudice”, “Sense and Sensibility” and “Mansfield Park.”

When analyzing the film, “Pretty Woman,” I have discovered a mutual dependency between the main characters that is present in Austen’s novels as well and will provide the essence of my thesis. The final scene of “Pretty Woman” manifests this relationship perfectly, when Edward asks Vivian about the ending of her dream and what the Princess did after the Knight rescued her. Vivian replies, “She rescued him right back.”

This mutual dependency of characters is an intriguing common theme between the Regency era and modern romantic film. Although it appears to manifested much more subtly in Austen’s work, Darcy and Elizabeth clearly rescue each other by tempering their own pride and prejudice with the understanding their relationship brings. This subtlety was naturally necessary in Austen’s time due to the patriarchal society that placed men above women, in terms of opinion and power. To openly state that a man would need a woman for something would have been shocking in the Regency era. However, mutual dependency proved to be a vital foundation of romance in Austen’s novels and era. When compared with modern film, the most drastic change in the “Cinderella” tale and romance is that women’s rights have expanded so drastically that equality in romance is depicted much more openly. This freedom to express in modern society allows Hollywood to take the “Cinderella” of Austen’s time and twist it into a story about two characters who need each other. Hollywood prefers to envision two soulmates, two opposites who attract, and two people completing one another. Austen may have envisioned a similar relationship, but society dictated that she shadow these feminist ideals with an inequality of power between the man and woman.

Therefore, I can conclude that romance itself has not altered with time, and the classic story of a man and woman who find each other has not changed. Society’s willingness to percieve an equality in this relationship is the only thing that has differed.

In case everyone completed forgot about my project due to a quite lengthy absence from the blogging scene, let me update all my eager listeners.

An obsession with Jane Austen’s infamous novels of the Regency era and the trashy modern chick flicks of our own era spurred me on to analyze and compare the “Cinderella” motif in both time periods, in order to observe if the perception of romance has altered at all from then to now.
Austen’s plots highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security, often depicting her protagonist rising from the ashes of poverty and disgrace to form a very beneficial marriage, through beauty, grace or wit. There is a striking resemblance between these thematic ideas and those of the common fairytale, “Cinderella”.

Although Austen continually mocks the society women’s feverish search for wealthy husbands, she does appear to condone the profitable matches of these heroines. She combines a sense of practicality with all her idealistic notions. Although she is a feminist in the core of her belief system, she tempers this, with the understanding that a woman cannot live on ideas alone. Therefore, Austen includes hints throughout her novels that wealth is still an important factor in marriage. When Bingley abandons his residence at the Netherfield Estate and the Bennets begin to lose all hope of his marrying Jane, Elizabeth feels pity and regret for her sister’s loss for more than her broken heart. Elizabeth keenly understands the way her sister’s marriage to Bingley would have benefited her own chances of finding a wealthy match, and she mourns the loss of this chance. Furthermore, Elizabeth does not fully admit her feelings for Mr. Darcy until she observes the grandeur of his estate at Pemberly and the wealth of his grounds there. However, Austen’s heroines never compromise their sense of self and their own values, in the search for a wealthy husband. This is the essence of what makes them strong, independent “Cinderella” figures.

More to come on modern chick flicks and my final conclusions on romance, look for the next post literally ASAP.

So in the final month of my project, my research consumed an even more ridiculous amount of my thought and energy, and this is a good thing. I learned not only a lot about my topic, but research itself.

If it’s been awhile since you’ve read a blog entry for me, let me refresh your memory as to what I set out to do. I intended to trace the role that different political thinkers’ conceptions of “free will” played in their political thought and, consequently, how free-will infused political rhetoric either moved the intended audience to action or left a bad taste in its collective mouth. This proved to be an incredibly broad topic, and my research fractured into two lines of investigation- one generally surveying the trend throughout American political history and the other delving into the role Jefferson’s nuanced beliefs regarding free will played in crafting the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. It is in the latter of the two that the majority of my research ended up being done.

If you can remember reading from my last blog entry (which I recommend reading if you’re going to go on reading this one), Jefferson’s original bill began with the following phrase:

“Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds…”

Seems like a denial of free will, right? Opinions and beliefs are independent of the will, are uncontrollable, “follow involuntarily” whatever comes to mind?

Not necessarily. Thanks to Gene Roche for suggesting I contact Jim Harris, Francis S. Haserot Professor Emeritus in philosophy at the College, who had done research in the same area.
Harris suggested that Jefferson wasn’t talking at all about the philosophical concept of free will. Rather, he was reiterating the Enlightenment emphasis on human reason and using that as justification for religious freedom. It was this point by Professor Harris that really made me take my research to another level.

So I found myself reading letters Jefferson wrote to his friends, books people have wrote about Jefferson, and even philosophical works of some of Jefferson’s friends. I found myself spending hours in the Library of Virginia going through microfilms and microfiches of Journals of the Senate and General Assembly and newspapers from 1799, 1785, and 1786. And what I found was that Jefferson had a thick metaphysical commitment to the belief that people are not responsible for the content of their thoughts. It grew out of his conception of a reason-loving God, materialism, and his own reflections on the mental process of reasoning. I also found that his critics understood him to making a metaphysical assertion, and that they did not like it one bit.

Now, whether this belief in fact influenced his drafting of the bill for establishing religious freedom is an unanswerable question, but it would certainly be consistent with the rest of his written thought, especially considering how close the language used in the original preamble is to language he used elsewhere about the same issue. It’s also supported by how upset he was that the relevant portions were excised from the bill.

So what are the implications? I go much further into it in my paper, but the long and the short of it is that even in passing the law that ultimately established freedom of thought, the author of the bill relied on a deep metaphysical commitment to what I call theological-ideological determinism, or the belief that God destined for people to have differing opinions and that they were not responsible for them—even as he himself claimed to keep a distance between his own mind and metaphysics. This is a sort of lesson about how there are certain metaphysical commitments that any policy is going to presuppose, and that they’re not always the ones one might expect. Jefferson sheds light on how we might continue to justify democracy in the event we were discover that we had no free will and how a belief in determinism can actually have consistent and happy political outcomes.

As for the prescriptive element of my paper, I go on to discuss how Jefferson’s presupposition was more or less a lucky one, and that other presuppositions throughout American history have actually allowed politicians to exploit their constituents for typically unfortunate ends. I end by contending that by bringing philosophical presuppositions to the foreground, Americans can demystify them, a process much more conducive to furthering liberal democracy than ignoring them via some kind of lightmindedness alla Richard Rorty.

In the end, I’m ridiculously pleased with how this project turned out. I found a genuinely interesting case study that fully engaged both my favorite philosophical conundrum and connected it to one of my favorite political figures, and it came merely from what began as a general survey of important political thinkers’ views. Furthermore, I truly believe that realizing these crucial facts about Jefferson has important implications for how we approach politics and for how we conceive of ourselves as the inheritors of Jefferson’s legacy. For full details, check out my paper online when I publish it some time in September (I’ll post a link to it). Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask! I love answering them.

Ah, the last Monroe blog post – and yes, just short of the deadline. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a serious procrastinator. However, I do believe that in the time since my last post, my project has encountered (and overcome) a significant hurdle that is worthy of discussion.

To preface: I am a political scientist. International relations major, research in the government department, political junkie – all the signs and symptoms of this terrible (albeit non-contagious) disease. Yet, when I embarked on this project, I knew that I would be leaving my political scientist tendencies behind. My study of the memorials to the 11-M Madrid Train Bombings is one based more in sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies than I am accustomed to. In fact, save for one class in the Hispanic Studies department called “Cross-Cultural Perspectives”, I have no formal training in this kind of study. I’m grateful for the challenge – I actually decided to base the project in those fields rather than political science to gain the experience with this kind of research – but it did leave me wondering how best to analyze all the information I gathered in Spain. In order to overcome this obstacle, and as a good political scientist, I developed my own methodology for analyzing the cultural artifacts I came across during my research.

My methodology involves asking a series of three questions about any given cultural artifact in order to analyze it. The first question is: what characteristics of this artifact make it unique and worthy of study? I must have taken a picture of it for some reason – what were the reasons I did so? What qualities does it have that should be noted? Does the color scheme matter? Is there something to be gleaned from the wording and use of language? What about size, shape, and environment? This can sometimes be trickier than it sounds. Some things may at first seem important, but once the other questions are asked about that aspect of the artifact, it no longer seems so worthy of attention.

The second question, once the important characteristics have been found, is: what is the significance of these aspects of the artifact? This is where the sociology comes into play. Why was a memorial structured in the way it was? What does its grandiosity imply? Does the language have meaning beyond face value? A lot of my personal experiences help with this part. I can use my memory of walking through the memorials, seeing them for the first time, as a guide to understanding their meaning. After all, if meaning is a human conception and interpretation, then how I interpreted it can be of value. At the same time, though, I have to be careful not to apply my standards to my interpretation. I have to think about the intent of the designers.

The third question is the core of this project, and it is: How does this significance relate to the cultural and societal identity of Spain? These memorials are unique to Spain – you can’t find them replicated anywhere else in the world. Their intended audience is the Spanish citizenry. They memorialize an attack on Spain. Their significance is therefore inextricably linked to Spanish identity. My job is to find this connection, this link. What does it say about Spanish identity? Does it reflect a changing Spanish identity? What was the impact of the attacks on Spanish identity, as expressed through the memorials?

A brief example. The memorial in the Atocha Train Station consists of a cylindrical structure inside of which there are messages of “peace”, “we will not forget”, etc. written in a number of different languages. The answer to the first question, what is important, included the messages themselves, the variety of languages they were written in, the upward spiraling of the messages, and the blue color scheme of the memorial. We’ll focus on the languages of the messages for this example. The second question asked what the significance of this variety of languages is. For one thing, it suggests multiculturalism and an acceptance of others – a recognition of what makes people different, while at the same time bringing them together without any sense of separation. It also implies universalism, and the idea that the messages can be written in any language and still have the same meaning and importance. The third question asked how this relates to Spanish identity. From my background research, I learned that many of the victims of the attacks were not Spaniards, but immigrants from other countries. From my interview with Dr. Roder, I know that the after the attacks, Spain recognized these victims not as immigrants, but as Spaniards, and that the country viewed the attack as one on all of Spain, not on the nationalities affected. This aspect of Spanish identity is clearly reflected in the use of many languages in the memorial. Dr. Roder also said that the attacks may have led to less zenophobia in Spain, since there was a recognition that the victims were attacked not as their nationalities, but as Spaniards. Perhaps the memorial is an acknowledgment that Spain can, and must, move past zenophobia and find an acceptance of immigrants from different cultures.

For all I know, this methodology breaks every rule of the scientific method and would cause a sociologist/anthropologist to have a stoke. But for the purposes of this project, it seems sufficient. Hopefully, as I finish up this project over the next few days (remember the “I’m a procrastinator” part?), it will provide me with some useful conclusions that will make for an intriguing study.