Something I meant to post about before

[muckefuck]

There's a field I pass on my way to work. For the last couple weeks, it's been playing host to something resembling a summer camp. At least three times, I walked by during a game of "amoeba".

I'm not sure what other names this goes by, so let me explaing the version I played at summer camp: It's a form of tag designed for a large horde of hyperactive kids. Two people are initially designated the "amoeba". They have to hold hands and run around together until they tag someone, who then links hands with them. After the three of them tag someone new, the amoeba splits into two smaller ones of two people each. This continues until the majority of the kids are "amoebacised". Then they rejoin, form a line across one end of the field, and march across it chanting "AMOEBA!! AMOEBA!!" as loud as possible while they capture and devour the stragglers.

In this variant, the amoebae never seemed to split. They just grew until large enough to span the field, meaning that the middle section basically stood its ground while the two arms (pseudopods?) concentrated on catching prey (and the game probably dragged out even more interminably than when I played it). Also, the chant at the end wasn't "AMOEBA!!" it was "ONE OF US!! ONE OF US!!"

That got me thinking. For Americans, that phrase is chilling. You will become one of us. You will be assimilated. Your personal identity will be elminated as you are subsumed into a formless mass. But, not to generalise and stereotype too much, but wouldn't some other cultures have an entirely different reaction? I'm reading Ian Buruma's Bad elements off and on these days. In it, he makes the interesting choice to try to understand "China"--this nebulous, mythic ideal of continuity and community--through the actions and insights of the dissidents and malcontents. It's intriguing because China has always been depicted as a faceless mass of timourus conformists, as the brainwashed yellow hordes who will one day come and overwhelm us all.

Damn, I'm not sure where I was going with this. I guess that's why I never wrote it down.

Comments

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

We never split the amoeba off, either. That was a fun game. I like the "one of us" variant.

And I think that's a good point re: China. I often read similar things about Japan, tho I don't know that I buy that that's still true in Japan. Or anywhere, really.

In a tangent, a sign on a church around the corner says, "Satan, Babel, and the Chinese language." I hope that's not as bad as it sounds.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

How could it not be? Best case scenario, the explanation of why the structure of the Chinese language obscures the truth and makes them more prone to sinful atheism and necromancy would be howlingly funny.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

The more I think about it, the more tempted I am to go.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

For Americans, that phrase is chilling. You will become one of us. You will be assimilated. Your personal identity will be elminated as you are subsumed into a formless mass.

On the other hand, isn't that the sort of thing that happens in a melting pot?

America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand [Graphically illustrating it on the table] in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won't be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you've come to-these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians-into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.

--Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot (1908).

[off_coloratura]

Perhaps they were making a Freaks reference.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

That occurred to me too. (Though of course, the current kids might not even know that they were, if the game mutated under the movie's influence some years back.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Many of the kids were young and Freaks is sufficiently obscure and cultish that I doubt even more than few of the older kids have seen it. That's why I think it's the content of the line itself rather than a borrowed cinematic context that makes it horrifying.