mixed feelings about Macon

I have mixed feelings about Macon.  On the one hand, his championing for civil rights is excellent, especially because he seems to be so aware of white privilege.  On the other hand, I have some qualms about how he goes about promoting equality.
Macon starts with random muggings.  First off, crime in the name of any cause is the best way to get that cause demonized.  Crime in the name of racial equality, which is such an important cause, is even worse.  In junior history we learned about how important it was for the civil rights movement to be seen as respectable, and for black people to be associated with nonviolence and noncriminality (if that's a thing.)  Macon disregards that completely.  When he starts talking about white devils to the people he mugs and they mistake him for a black person, he's adding to the negative stereotype of "black people are criminals" that's spread so often by the media.  Second, that Macon's first step into making change is a criminal one does not inspire confidence in his mental state.  No one really sane or capable of rational thinking chooses criminal actions as a way to promote positive social change.
Macon also constantly puts down others in order to elevate himself.  At the meeting that he invites himself to, he derides all of their potential speaker choices, and he decides that he himself is above all of these people.  This seems hypocritical, especially given Macon's belief in the "white devil." Macon himself is white, and while he is trying desperately to become black, he never will be.  So for him to proclaim himself blacker than the actual black people at the meeting is fairly hypocritical.
The Day of Apology fiasco is just another cherry on top of the "what on earth is Macon doing" sundae.  I think Macon promoted the Day of Apology not because he wanted to sincerely apologize to black people, but because he wanted to make white people uncomfortable. And while there's no good way to set something like this up, I definitely feel like the Day of Apology could have been a lot better organized.

thoughts about Jack and aspie behavior

While reading Room, I remembered something I had read in an article written by a mother of a young boy with Asperger's Syndrome (a quick rundown for those unfamiliar with the syndrome:  Asperger's is part of the autism spectrum.  It's generally more mild than fully blown autism, but it affects social interaction, nonverbal communication, and several other things.)  In the article, she described how her son was getting ready for a car ride when he asked for her help in securing the "backwards seven."  She had no idea what he was talking about, until she realized that he was talking about his seat belt, which would look like a backwards seven to him when he looked down on it.  Jack's terms for things that he's just now discovering made me think of this.
There are other things that Jack does that make remind me of aspie behaviors, like his difficulty speaking to people other than his mother when he first leaves the room.  While I doubt Jack really is on the autism spectrum, it's interesting to compare his behavior to the behavior of neurodiverse people.  It really brings into context how damaging being trapped in Room was to his development.

ma and psychological abuse

Despite our perception of Ma being filtered through Jack's naive worldview, it's not hard to see that Ma suffers constantly. She lives with constant physical pain, she has to deal with the ever-present fear of Old Nick, and she is also trying to raise a child (which is stressful by itself) in a tiny room. It's implied that Old Nick comes to their room frequently and rapes her, and she has injuries that she received from him both recently and in the past. He abuses her physically. He also abuses her psychologically. The most commonly used diagnostic tool (the Conflict tactics scale) divides psychological abuse up into about 20 different tactics, which fall into three basic categories. 

1. Verbal aggression (e.g., saying something that upsets or annoys someone else);

2. Dominant behaviors (e.g., preventing someone from contacting their family);

3. Jealous behaviors (e.g., accusing a partner of maintaining other parallel relations)

It's obvious that Old Nick does things that fall into the first two of those three categories (most notably is him confining them in Room, which falls into the second category.) If you read their conversations, Old Nick frequently pushes the blame for things onto Ma. For example, he complains that the wear on the cork board is Ma and Jack's faults, saying that he only expected to have one person in the room. The wear on the cork board is entirely Old Nick's fault, because he was the one who put Ma (and eventually Jack) in the room in the first place.

Pete, Delmar and Everett

O Brother Where Art Thou is obviously based on the Odyssey, and there are multiple parallels and allusions to the Odyssey in O Brother Where Art Thou.  Everett, of course, is a stand-in for Odysseus.  Pete and Delmar are his (often inept and disobedient) crew, the three ladies are the sirens, the KKK member is the cyclops, etc. etc.  However, I think it's a good idea to consider that Pete and Delmar aren't just representations of Odysseus's crew.
First off, Everett isn't a very Odysseus-like character.  Sure, he's the dubious hero, and he's cunning and wily, but he doesn't have all of Odysseus's traits.  Most of that can be attributed to the fact that O Brother Where Art Thou is not an exact copy of the Odyssey, so the characters will differ.  But also, maybe Everett isn't entirely Odyssian because he's only one third of the Odysseus figure in O Brother Where Art Thou.
Pete and Delmar represent the other two thirds of the Odysseus figure in O Brother Where Art Thou.  Pete is Odysseus's loyalty to his crew and family.  Even though his cousin sells them out for the bounty on their heads, Pete still gets mad when Everett reveals that he stole Wash's watch.  Pete doesn't seem to care about the fact that Walsh betrayed them.
Delmar represents the part of Odysseus that respects and fears the supernatural.  Delmar is superstitious and eager to believe in a higher power.  He immediately believes that Pete has been turned into a toad, and he is the first to be baptized.  He puts more stock into the supernatural than Everett and Pete combined.  Everett, of course, is skeptical of anything dealing with a higher power, and believes that everything can be explained by science.
Everett is the most Odyssian of all the characters, and he is (of course) the hero.  He, like Odysseus, is a clever and cunning man.  He has Odysseus's slightly amoral personality, and his charisma.  He's the one on the quest to get back home, and he drags the others into it with him.

the problems of heroes

This is a post I started way back at the start of the class, and never finished.

So in class we discussed relatability of heroes.  Superman, Iron Man, and Ender (from Ender's Game) were brought up.  It was said that Superman and Iron Man weren't as relatable as Ender, and we talked about why.
I'm fairly certain that when we discussed Iron Man in class we meant the Iron Man viewed in the popular movies that came out fairly recently (Avengers, Iron Man 1-3, etc.)  And that Iron Man is seen as a bold, vain guy who became a hero because he enjoyed the glory and because he had the money and skill to do whatever he wanted.  In this post I'm going to be talking about the Iron Man from the original Marvel Comics, because he fits my topic better (also he's the Iron Man I prefer, simply because he's a deeper character than the newer Iron Man.)  The Iron Man from the original comics suffers from multiple problems.  He's an alcoholic, (recovering, I think,) and he's depressed.  He goes through a lot of hard times and he makes a lot of terrible decisions that mess up his life and his friendships with everyone around him. He does what he believes is right, but what he does causes a lot of suffering.  And yet, no one talks about his heroism and personal struggles.  This is probably mostly because no one reads the comics anymore, and the movies haven't discussed any of his comic-canon personal issues.
But I also think that people don't talk about Iron Man's heroism because of his personal problems.  That is, I think there are three types of problems heroes face.  There are the realistic problems, the unrealistic problems, and the hyper-realistic problems.
Realistic hero problems are fairly self-explanatory.  Ender suffers from realistic hero problems. (Yes, I'm aware that he lives in a dystopian society, and killing aliens and leading armies at his age is not realistic.)  Ender's problems can all be reduced to basic themes like resisting societal expectations (being a hero even though he's a "third," or an unwanted child,) taking on responsibilities he doesn't feel ready for (commanding a giant army and dealing with the consequences of sacrificing other people for the greater good,) and developing functional relationships with other people (he's a loner, and he has to decide between making friendships with people his age, or treating his friends as subordinates. He's also a victim of bullying and emotional manipulation.) Ender is relatable because his problems are more extreme versions of problems everyone faces while growing up.  He has realistic hero problems.
Unrealistic hero problems are also pretty basic.  Superman has unrealistic hero problems.  While people can relate to Superman taking on giant burdens (like being responsible for the safety of the earth,) it's harder to relate to some of his other problems. Because Superman is essentially super human, he's not as affected by the problems normal people have.  He has no flaws, he's morally righteous, and he can do anything.  There are no relatable problems that could possibly challenge Superman.  So to give his story conflict, all his problems have to be unrealistic and impossible.  Realistically, no one struggles against an evil arch-villain in an effort to save all of humanity.  You could maybe say that people struggle with personal demons that threaten their worlds, but that's not quite the same.  Superman's problems are all unrealistic.  Also, here's an article about why Superman as a hero is boring:  http://www.cracked.com/blog/3-reasons-its-so-hard-to-make-superman-interesting/
Hyperrealistic hero problems are the problems that we don't want our heroes to have because they are too real.  Because they don't go away even after the day has been saved. They're realistic problems, but they're too realistic.  As a whole, our society has an unfortunate tendency to think of people with mental illnesses as being "broken."  And while we like to see heroes making their way through hardships and coming out on top, we don't like to see heroes who can't solve their problems.  Iron Man has hyperrealistic hero problems because he has to work against his depression and his alcoholism.  And in the end, even if he works through his depression, it's still there.  Depression doesn't just disappear when the hero has saved the world.