In Fredric Jamison's article, postmodernism is examined as a successor and effacer of modernism. The question is whether postmodernism can embody the same necessary societal elements as its precursor. He describes postmodernism as a reaction against the establishment of high modernism, which itself had to struggle greatly in order to achieve the status it enjoyed for so long.

The Dow article doesn't use the phrase "public secret" when describing the situation at Krome, the INS detention center near Miami, but it is very similar to the Daniel article: injustices are committed upon the prisoners, particularly the women, and the public knows nothing about it. The big difference is that in this article, the public is less at fault. Yes, we did allow an oppressive prison complex to arise because we foolishly thought that more prisons equaled more safety, but the author focuses just as much on the fact that the injustices within the system are deliberately hushed by those in charge. It has occurred to me as I have been pondering the concept of the "public secret" that it isn't entirely the public's fault that the secret exists. Verily, the Dow article says, "The secretive immigration prison world is likely to be pulled even further from public scrutiny." Granted, those who voted for more prisons and tighter immigration controls are far from innocent in this matter, but I wonder if so much blame should be heaped upon people for not knowing about the injustices in the prison systems when the media has been banned from entering the prisons and thus from reporting to the populace. From what I read in the Dow article, anyone who tried to publicize the injustices at the prison was silenced. I think I'm partially motivated to absolve myself of some of the blame inherent in public secrets, but I daresay the majority of the blame falls on the people who restrict the information in the first place.

Angela Davis is another witness to prison injustice. She remarks on the ease with which "tough on crime" policies were introduced and the exponential expansion of prisons and prison populations: to people who expect to never end up in prison, meaning most people, the idea that people who commit crimes will be punished thusly is a convincing one. After all, if you're a criminal, you ought to be imprisoned. I mean, no one wants criminals on the street. The problem is that prisons are a self-perpetuating phenomenon. When a prison opens (for instance, in a town where a big corporation just packed up and left thousands jobless), new jobs are created (and the jobless people who turn to crime are imprisoned). The state pays the contractors who build the prisons, and the prisoners are used as cheap labor. In essence, prisons funnel money out of poor communities, and the prisoners are disproportionately Black and Latino.

Appadurai: globalization, ethnocide, econocide, ideocide, incompleteness, rage. Re national ethos: "No modern nation, however benign its political system and however eloquent its public voices may be about the virtues of tolerance, multiculturalism, and inclusion is free of the idea that its national sovereignty is built on some sort of ethnic genius." Intranational violence requires minorities. The racialized indirect violence in the U.S. - filling prisons with minorities - is the result of a national feeling of incompleteness. The majority subconscious seems to say "If those dang minorities would just disappear, we could have a nation filled with the people whose great ancestors colonized this land and built this great country." But then we remember the Nazis' attempt to do just that, and we are ashamed, so we just keep doing what we're doing, only we don't talk about it that way.

Appadurai's notes that minorities will always be present in a society because the society actually creates minorities. This extends from the national level to my experience back in middle school where my clique of friends (who, by the way, hated the idea of cliques - that was for the "popular" kids) more than once created a minority within ourselves. This minority consisted of one young man who happened to have the fewest social skills, and he was ostracized slowly and painfully. We didn't think of it or call it ostracization; it was simply that everyone more or less found him to be annoying, and so when the one member who found him unbearable verbally ousted him, no one else interfered. It validated the existence of everyone who was included, and ruined the excluded boy's school experience. I often felt sorry for him - it wasn't his fault that he happened to aggravate - but I was shamefully glad when he was gone. We talked about it occasionally - "yeah, I feel sorry for him, but I just can't stand him!" In the end, we knew we'd done something hurtful, but I think we all rationalized it in the same way that people who never expect to go to prison do: "I'M certainly not going to do anything that would be a reason for imprisonment (or ostracization); as for those people who would, they deserve it!" The problem arises when we think we've purged the transgressive minority: ever so subtly, a new minority is created. Another kid is annoying in a different way. And thus middle school sociopolitical happenings echo those of a nation.