Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910)

The Discoverer, Founder, and Leader of Christian Science, and author of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.

Born in Bow, New Hampshire, in 1821, Mary Baker Eddy was the youngest of the six children of Abigail and Mark Baker. From childhood, she suffered from poor health, although she attended local schools when well enough. Very soon she developed a strong interest in the biblical accounts of early Christian healing. In her discovery of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy found that healing the sick was an integral part of Christian service. Even in early childhood, healing played a role in Mary's life. Her family would bring ailing farm animals to her for healing.

In 1843, at the age of 22, she married George Washington Glover. Mary Baker Glover first came into touch with slavery in the South. Her husband owned some slaves and her sense of right revolted against the practice. After his death Mrs. Glover set free her husband’s slaves. Mrs. Glover continued to write on the subject of slavery, which was daily becoming a more and more burning question and was soon to culminate in the Civil War. She had made a brief experiment of opening a children’s school somewhat on the lines of the kindergarten system, but the times were not ready for this venture and she soon abandoned it. At this time, spiritualism and allied beliefs were stirring public thought. Mrs. Glover interested herself in these matters as she did in the question of slavery, and gradually won her way to definite convictions concerning spiritualism, mesmerism, and animal magnetism (later called hypnotism), convictions which she has recorded in her writings. She was widowed in less than a year, and her health worsened after the birth of her son.

In 1853, hoping to provide a home for her son, she married Dr. Daniel Patterson, a dentist. Daniel Patterson signed papers to that effect on their wedding day. However, he never followed through on his promise. Her symptoms worsened and plunged her into a deep depression. In October 1862 she became a patient of Phineas Quimby, a magnetic healer from Maine. She benefited temporarily by his treatment and his beliefs influenced her later thinking and writing although to what extent has been frequently disputed. The marriage proved unhappy, and the couple separated after 13 years, when Daniel deserted her. Seven years later, she sought and obtained a divorce on the grounds of his adultery.

During the 1840s and 1850s, she explored various systems of healing, including homeopathy, hydropathy, and mesmerism, to find health. Throughout this time, however, she found strength, solace, and hope in the Bible, which was her constant companion.

Her search culminated when, on February 1, 1866, she sustained serious internal injuries after a fall on an icy sidewalk. She remained unconscious through that night, and the physician called to treat her held out little hope for her recovery. Her condition worsening, on February 4, she asked for her Bible, and while reading an account of one of Jesus' healings, found herself suddenly well in a moment of profound spiritual insight. She felt that behind this healing lay spiritual laws, and she began a renewed study of the Bible to learn how she had been healed. By the end of 1866, she had gained the certainty that "all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon". By early 1867, she began to teach others the science of Christian healing, which she named Christian Science.
In 1875 she published the first edition of Science and Health, a complete statement of Christian Science.
In 1877 she married Asa Gilbert Eddy who, being in bad health, had been sent to her for treatment. She had healed him, had taken him through one of her classes, and had learned to trust him so thoroughly that she had placed many of her affairs in his charge. He proved a strong support to her during the formative years of establishing Christian Science. His death in 1882 was a severe blow to her, but she continued to teach, preach, and lecture on Christian Science.

She founded The Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879, to "… reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing". Through her own prolific practice of Christian Science healing, she rejected the notion that the human mind was a healing agent. Instead, she maintained that healing came through the divine Mind, God. Central to such healing, she held, was regeneration and spiritual growth. "Healing physical sickness is the smallest part of Christian Science," she writes in Rudimental Divine Science, adding, "The emphatic purpose of Christian Science is the healing of sin…" While Eddy was a highly controversial religious leader, author, and lecturer, thousands of people flocked to her teachings. She was supported by the approximately 800students, she had taught at her Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston, Massachusetts between the years 1882 and 1889. These students spread across the country practicing healing in accordance with Eddy's teachings. Eddy authorized these students to list themselves as Christian Science Practitioners in the church's periodical, the Christian Science Journal. She also founded The Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly magazine with articles about how to heal and testimonies of healing.

By 1900, newspapers and magazines were seeking her views on every conceivable topic, but she resisted public efforts to extol her personality, and tirelessly turned her followers away from reliance on her to reliance on God.

From 1880 to 1910, she wrote scores of articles on Christian Science; founded monthly and weekly periodicals and, in 1908, at the age of 87, established an award-wining international daily newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor.

On December 3, 1910, she passed on at the age of 89. She is buried in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. As part of her legacy to the world, the practice of Christian healing has received renewed interest and attention. There are Churches of Christ, Scientist, in over 70 countries today.

In 1995, Eddy was recognized for her many achievements and inducted in the National Women's Hall of Fame. In 2002, The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity opened to researchers, scholars, and the public, allowing access to hundreds of thousands of documents and artifacts. It housed one of the largest multi-disciplinary collections by and about an American woman.

The Mary Baker Eddy House is located at 12 Broad St. in Lynn, MA, within the Diamond District Historic District. The house is owned by Longyear Museum whose mission is to advance the understanding of the life and work of Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer, Founder, and Leader of Christian Science.

Her Famous Quotations:

• True prayer is not asking God for love; it is learning to love, and to include all mankind in one affection.
  
• Sin makes its own hell and goodness its own heaven.

Her Works:

• Science And Health, With Key To The Scriptures - 1875, revised through 1910
• Miscellaneous Writings
• Retrospection and Introspection
• Unity of Good
• Pulpit and Press
• Rudimental Divine Science
• No and Yes
• Christian Science versus Pantheism
• Message to The Mother Church, 1900
• Message to The Mother Church, 1901
• Message to The Mother Church, 1902
• Christian Healing
• The People's Idea of God
• The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany
• The Manual of The Mother Church
  

References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Baker_Eddy
2. http://www.endtime.org/intro/mbe.html
3. http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/ucbio_mary_baker_eddy.htm
4. http://womenshistory.about.com/library/qu/blqueddy.htm
5. http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/travel/pwwmh/ma53.htm
6. http://www.allaboutcults.org/mary-baker-eddy-faq.htm
7. http://www.essortment.com/all/whowasmarybak_rrym.htm
8. http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761569507/Eddy_Mary_Baker.html
9. http://longyear.org/mbe.html

Voting and Non-voting Behavior in the Election of 2004

One of the controversial issues about presidential elections in the U.S. that has attracted a lot of attention and discussion is the fact that sometimes president is elected while he doesn’t receive the majority of the popular vote but receives the majority in the Electoral College. This is the case that happened in the election of 2000.
Another issue that has arisen a hot debate among political scientists is the fact that the number of people who vote is decreasing since 1960. Both of these issues are of great importance since they can lead to questioning democracy in the U.S.

There are two controversial questions to answer:
1) Why do people vote in the way they do? To answer this question there are many theories among political scientists. However, there are two major theories: the “party identification” model and the “issue voting” model.
2) Why in a democratic country do so many people fail to exercise their democratic right to cast ballot at presidential elections? To answer this question we can go through two series of explanations: institutional explanations and socio-economic explanations.

As it is clear the first question examines the voting behavior and the second question examines the non-voting behavior of an election. In this article I am going to examine these issues in the election of 2004.

Voting Behavior:
1)The case for the party identification model: this model suggests that most Americans develop an affiliation to one party as they grow up and the attachment tends to determine the way they vote for the rest of their lives. It seems that they are mostly stable and resistant to change. However, usually about one-third of the electorate is likely to change their mind.
Here is a report on election results that can show what percentage of voters have voted for the same party they had voted before.

PRESIDENTIAL VOTE IN 2000 - BUSH , KERRY , NADER
Did Not Vote (17%) - 45% , 54% , 1%
Gore (37%) - 10% , 90% , 0%
Bush (43%) - 91% , 9% , 0%
Other (3%) - 21% , 71% , 3%

http://edition.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/result/index.html

As it is shown in this report more than two-thirds of the voters have voted for the same party. So this model is applicable in this election.
Russell J. Dalton and Steven Weldon in their article, “Is the Party Over? Spreading Antipathy Toward Political Parties” state that in recent decades, a marked weakening of partisan ties across Western democracies is seen. This process of partisan "dealignment" first became apparent in the United States. American partisanship was extremely stable from the 1950s to the early 1960s, with party identifiers constituting 70-75 percent of the electorate. But loyalties began to weaken after the 1964 election. By the 1980s, more than a third of the electorates were nonpartisans, and in the 1990s, Ross Perot's third-party candidacy in the two presidential elections pushed the percentage of partisans down still further. The percentage of partisans hit a new low in the 2000 American National Election Study (59 percent), and this pattern continued into the 2004 election (60 percent), despite the highly politicized and partisan nature of the Bush/Kerry campaign.

2)The case for the issue voting model: the theorists of this model argue that in recent years there has been a process of dealignment, a process by which voters gradually lose their attachment to parties in general and become independent instead. These voters who vote according to the issue essentially vote in two votes, prospective and retrospective. Voting prospectively the voter considers each candidates opinion and future program on each separate issue but voting retrospectively the voter considers the previous achievements or failures of a special voter.

COMPARED TO FOUR YEARS AGO, U.S. IS …. - BUSH ,KERRY, NADER
Safer From Terrorism (54%) - 79%, 20% , 0%
Less Safe (41%) - 14%, 85% , 0%

HOW BUSH IS HANDELING HIS JOB - BUSH , KERRY, NADER
Approve (53%) - 90% , 9% , 0%
Disapprove (46%) - 6% , 93% , 0%

http://edition.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/result/index.html

It is shown that most of the voters who have been satisfied with Bush’s job in his previous term of presidency have voted for him again and according to these results more than half of the voters vote retrospectively.

Non-voting Behavior:
1) Institutional explanations: in this area some political scientists believe the decrease in the turnout can be because of the political system itself within the political institutions.
Robert Longley in his article, “Survey Answers, Why Don't More Americans Vote?” explains that according to the results released by the California Voter Foundation (CVF), 28 percent of infrequent voters and 23 percent of those unregistered said they do not vote or do not register to vote because they are too busy. Also a feeling that candidates don’t really speak to them was cited as the second leading reason why infrequent voters and nonvoters do not vote.
2)Socio-political explanations: in this model some factors like education and age are contributed to non-voting behavior.
According to Robert H. Binstock, “the percentage of older persons voting for George Bush was slightly more than the national average, suggesting that old-age policy issues are not the predominant factors affecting older voters.”
In another article, “Turnout of Under-25 Voters Rose Sharply in 2004”, Robert Longley points out that data released by the Pew Charitable Trust shows that the turnout rate of 18-24 year old voters in the 2004 presidential election rose by 5.8 percent, as 1.8 million more people in this age group voted than in 2000. On Nov. 2, 2004, 10.5 million under-25 voters went to the polls, compared to 8.7 million in 2000, raising the turnout rate to 42.3 percent from 36.5 percent.

References:
1. http://cnn.com/
2. http://www.about.com/
3. http://www.publicopinionpros.com/

Presentation

The ‘New American Cultural Sociology’
An Appraisal
By Gregor McLennan

• Gregor McLennan
  He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Marxism, Pluralism and Social Theory, he has recently published a range of articles on the contemporary status and nature of sociological discourse. He is currently investigating the way that ideas and intellectuals operate in ‘knowledge society’ contexts. He has also contributed to several collections in social and political theory and cultural studies.
  
• Jeffrey C. Alexander
  He is Professor of Sociology at Yale University. With Ron Eyerman, he is Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS). Jeffrey Alexander works in the areas of theory, culture, and politics. An exponent of the “strong program” in cultural sociology, he has investigated the cultural codes and narratives that inform diverse areas of social life. He is the author of The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology , Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity , and The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim . In the field of politics, Alexander has written The Civil Sphere (Oxford, 2006), which includes discussions of gender, race, and religion, as well as new theorizing about social movements and incorporation.
  
• Cultural sociology
  Interprets social life through cultural analysis.
  Studies cultural impacts on societies and social interactions.
  
• Early theorists
  Karl Marx
  Marx's belief of culture is that the most powerful members of a society are those who live in the ruling class. These members set up the culture of a society in order to provide the best interests to that society. He has also talked about how a society's economic status determines their values and ideologies.
  
  Émile Durkheim
  Durkheim had the belief that culture has many relationships to society which include:
  • Functional- Certain rites and myths create build social order up more by having people create strong beliefs, the more people who believe in these myths will strengthen social order.
  • Historical- Culture had its origins in society, and from those experiences came evolution into things such as classification systems
  • Logical- Power over individuals belongs to certain cultural categories, and beliefs such as god.
  
  
  
• Alexander’s four levels of abstraction:
  1.Post-positivism: the necessary philosophical framing for all social enquiry
  2.The project of cultural sociology
  3.Its application in a series of substantive cultural exploration
  4.Political ideology of civil society and multiculturalism
  
• The project of cultural sociology
  1. Relative autonomy of culture: according to John Thompson it may result in ‘impasse’.
  2.Internal massive feelings rule the world
  3.Fantasy and reality are interwoven and difficult to separate
  
  
• Substantive applications
  “the line dividing the sacred from the profane must be drawn and re-drawn time and time again…through such phenomena as scandals, moral panics, public punishments, and wars, societies provide occasions to re-experience and recrystallize the enemies of the good.”
  
  1.Watergate
  2.Information technology
  3.Holocaust(as an example for the idea of ‘cultural trauma’)
  According to Alexander, attributions of good and evil are not static, they go through adaptations as societies face challenges called cultural trauma.
  
  
• The immanent utopia of civil society and multiculturalism

Utopia:
1.Only a social sphere separate from market and state
2.Democratic public opinion
3.In spite of ‘anti-civil’ forces, it keeps ‘equality, solidarity and respect', these forces push back destructive intrusions and carry out ‘civil repairs’.

• Multiculturalism
  
  1.Different from ‘assimilation’ that is culture blind and just qualities are purified.
  2.Different from ‘hyphenation’ that just persons are purified.
  3.But a society where both persons and qualities are purified.
  
• Conclusion:
  According to Terry Eagleton, Alexander in an anti-foundationalist going for a new foundationalism who privileges culture rather than God or nation (society) and elevated it to a near-sacred moral status.

American Studies

What is American Studies?

The first time I encountered this conception was in a book called “Americography: the Pictorial Notes of America” by Mehdi Arjmand. In fact I had received it as a gift. As I always do I took a look at the back of the book and then the introduction. In both parts the writer seemed so critical of the subject. I thought to myself, why most of such books have a negative point of view about America? Is that the whole reality? I decided to read the book any way. In fact it was just a brief history of America with lots of pictures that in my idea were used to make it more attractive especially for the young adults who usually find history boring. But while in general it was offering a negative opinion about the country, it didn’t contain any justifying reasons. So it left me with a question without answer. However there was one thing that remained in my mind and absorbed me most, a sentence in the introductory that the writer had quoted from one of his friends,

“America is the last empire of the world. It is like a huge dinosaur that is called to the kitchen!!!”

Now I am a MA student of North American studies, an interdisciplinary field dealing with the study of the United States that incorporates the study of economics, history, literature, art, the media, film, urban studies, women's studies, and culture of the United States, among other fields.
One of my professors once called it “world study” and another one defines it as “narrative of exceptionalism and empire.” And what has been my impression till now,

“American studies truly allows me to explore every facet of American culture in which I’ve ever had an interest, pushing me to draw connections and parallels that I may not have seen before.”

Social class in the U.S.

Also submitted in Ezine Articles:
http://EzineArticles.com/?id=919475

How Class Ascendancy is presented in American Novel?

Social stratification:
Social stratification can be described as the “layering of society” that has got different kinds and types of systems. Typically, there are three important systems.

1. Estate system
The central characteristic of the estate system of stratification is that it is based in land and in loyalty to an entity that controls, distributes the land -- usually the monarchy. In this kind of system of inequality there are three estates: the landed gentry/nobility, the serfs or peasantry, and the clergy.

2.Caste systems
The principal distinction between a cast and estate system has to do with the part played by religion in the separation of groups. Both caste and estate systems were based in agriculture and the ownership of property. However, the caste system made distinctions among groups of people in terms of their standing sanctioned by religion.

3.Class systems
Class systems seem to be more a product of the industrial revolution. Classes arise from the industrial productive system. Marx is in fact one of the first to describe such a system, but does not go a long way toward defining what the classes are except to note there are two principal classes: owners and workers.
So in class system stratification in according to social class which itself is based on occupation, education, income and wealth.
What makes class system different from the other ones is the fact that it is somewhat more open than either the estate or caste system. People can move up (or down) with some degree of ease.

Class Ascendancy:
Class ascendancy is defined as moving from a lower level to an upper level. That is what is so much developed in American dream that refers to the idea that one's prosperity depends upon one's own abilities and hard work, not on a rigid class structure. So American dream gives opportunity and freedom to all people to reach their goals without the pressures imposed by class.

Class Ascendancy in American novel:
This idea has always been considered as the essence of American dream and consequently has been a central theme in American literature.

For example in The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jay Gatsby is a self-made, self-invented millionaire who has the ability to transform his dreams into reality. Fitzgerald has put his country’s most significant obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings in this character. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--". That is what makes it a tale about the American dream that an individual can achieve success regardless of family history, race, or religion simply by working hard enough.

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937) is another example in which George's and Lennie, migrant workers are constantly moving from one place to another in hoping to improve their life. They are in search of their dream, being able to own a home, have a job, and have a family to enjoy it with. So their dream matches American dream which is more obviously represented when George tries to calm Lennie down by reminding her of a story about the large farm they're going to buy one day and how they will live there and enjoy nature and work and live together forever, whenever they get into trouble. Throughout the story they never give up their dreams of improving their life to an upper level, exactly what is defined in class ascendancy.

In his next work, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck focuses on one family, The Joads, former tenant farmers in Oklahoma who were forced out by the larger companies who wanted their land back during the Great Depression. So with dreams of luscious grapes and peaches in abundance waiting to be picked, they start their journey to California. Despite poverty, homelessness, death, and despair, the Joads refuse to give up their dignity, decency and spirit. They struggle to exist and do not give up their dream that their life can be better.

In spite of a lot of other works that symbolize the corruption of American dream, this theme continues to be represented in more modern novels such as The House on Mango Street (1991) by Sandra Cisneros. Esperanza Cordero is a girl from Hispanic quarter of Chicago who doesn’t like to belong to her neighborhood. She likes to have a better home, a better life, and greater opportunities. She uses poems and stories to escape reality and express her thoughts and feelings about her oppressive environment. So she is a girl refers to her own power and invents her dreams to change her life, the dreams that appropriately fall into American dream.

In addition to above mentioned novels, there are a lot more examples that develop the American idea of possibility of class ascendancy in the so-called land of opportunities, providing equal chances for everyone. However, there are novels that concentrate on social gap and inequality such as Dreiser’s American tragedy and Sister Carrie, Cran’s Maggie: A Girl of All Streets, etc.
For sure reading these novels and putting them together can give us a valuable understanding of the role of social class in the U.S.

Human Rights

Human Rights vs. National Security

Human rights refer to the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled. They include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law, and social, cultural and economic rights, such as the right to participate in culture, the right to work, and the right to education. [1]

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights

In the Case of National Security:
National loyalties have been described as a destructive influence on the human rights movement because they deny people's innately similar human qualities.
With the exception of the non-derogateable human rights (the four most important are the right to life, the right to be free from slavery, the right to be free from torture and the right to be free from retroactive application of penal laws, the UN recognizes that human rights can be limited or even pushed aside during times of national emergency – although

“the emergency must be actual, affect the whole population and the threat must be to the very existence of the nation. The declaration of emergency must also be a last resort and a temporary me
Resource: The United Nations

The Case of US:
Since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, and due to the subsequent War on terror and concerns about national security and terrorism in countries around the world, a number of national laws and measures have come into force limiting some domestic human rights in the name of national security. They include, amongst others, the Patriot Act in the United States and detention-without-trial. The United States has also used extraordinary rendition in order to allow suspects to be subjected to harsh interrogation that may constitute torture in third party states and has employed detention without trial at its controversial facility at Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, contrary to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Torture Policy:
The Bush administration asserts that it does not use or condone torture. Its definition of torture, however, remains unclear. At the end of 2004, the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a memorandum repudiating earlier policies that had permitted a broad range of brutal interrogation tactics by, among other legal sleights-of-hand, redefining torture to exclude all techniques that did not inflict pain equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.. The Department has not, however, ever revealed what its definition currently is.
Authorized Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) interrogation techniques apparently include a notorious method the administration has renamed “water boarding” (when practiced by Latin American dictatorships, it was called “the submarine”) forcefully submerging a suspects head in water or otherwise making him believe he is about to drown. The director of the CIA has stated that water boarding is a professional interrogation technique.
As noted above, the Bush Administration asserts that U.S. treaty obligations to refrain from cruel, inhuman and degrading (CID) treatment do not apply to the conduct of nonmilitary U.S. personnel interrogating non-U.S. citizens outside of the United States.
Led by Vice President Cheney, the Bush administration strongly resisted efforts by Congress to strengthen the legal ban against torture. A measure proposed by Republican Senator John McCain to prohibit torture and other ill-treatment of detainees anywhere by the U.S. military and the CIA passed 90-9 in the Senate but at this writing had not been approved by the full Congress at least in part because of administration objections.[2]

As you see Anti-human rights actions are done a lot in the US – in a country which has been established based on “Bill of Human Rights” and has always condemned other countries of not respecting human rights. You can find a lot more reports and news in suggested sites below and judge about it yourself.

1. http://www.ihrc.org/
2. http://hrw.org/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights
4. http://www.icrc.org/

References:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights
2. http://hrw.org/

Film Review

Also submitted in IMDb:
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Dead Man (1995): Nightmare Vision of the Old West

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Writer: Jim Jarmusch
Genre: Drama/ Western
Music: Neil Young
Language: English
Color: Black and White
Running Time: 121 minutes
Starring: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Mili Avital, Crispin Glover, Gabriel Byrne, Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton, Jared Harris, John Hurt, Alfred Molina, Robert Mitchum

This story of a young man's passage through a frontier crawling with violence, death and decay begins on a train whose soot-faced fireman (Crispin Glover) delivers an ominous prediction. Appearing in the car where William Blake (Johnny Depp), the film's protagonist, is playing solitaire, he warns Blake that when he reaches his destination, the town of Machine, he will find his own grave.
As the train hurtles westward, Blake, dressed in a bow tie and checkered suit, finds himself surrounded by silent faces. Peering out the window, he sees remains of abandoned covered wagons and other signs of decay. When the train passes a buffalo herd, his fellow passengers go to the windows with rifles and blindly open fire.
He arrives in Dickinson where he is going to be employed as an accountant but showing up at the place, he is informed that the post has been filled. When he confronts the owner, John Dickinson (Robert Mitchum), he is ordered at gunpoint to leave at once.
Blake visits a bar where he meets Thell Russell (Mili Avital), an attractive woman who takes him back to her shabby rented room filled with paper flowers she has made. While they're in bed together, Thell's former boyfriend, Charlie Dickinson (the company owner's son, played by Gabriel Byrne), appears and shoots at Blake but kills Thell instead. Blake shoots Charlie with Thell's gun, and jumps out a window, but not before he himself is critically wounded. Blake suddenly finds himself a fugitive with a bullet in his chest.
From here, the movie changes from a horrifying frontier into something more problematic and self-conscious. Pursued by bounty hunters and law officers, Blake makes his way westward until he reaches the Pacific. For much of the way he is accompanied by an Indian guide named Nobody (Gary Farmer), who has dressed his wounds and believes his companion to be the reincarnation of the English poet William Blake.
When Nobody tells his story, it turns out that he, too, is a sort of fugitive. Captured as a boy by white men, he was taken East and exploited as a sideshow attraction and from there to England, where he was educated and discovered Blake's poetry. The Indian appoints himself the poet's guide back into the spirit world.

So what is depicted in the movie is the idea that Blake encounters a world of danger and decay rather than promise and freedom. Dead Man suggests that the West was indeed vital, but was a place of death rather than growth. Instead of an optimistic assessment of virgin land and opportunity, the film presents the spread of what one might call "white blight," the viral meanness and ignorance spread by European industrialism onto the lands of the lands of the indigenous tribes. That Jarmusch respects but thankfully falls short of romanticizing his Native American characters is one of Dead Man's more singular points of interest.

Like most great Westerns, Dead Man holds the American West and its (white) inhabitants up to close scrutiny, and in this sense its radicalism surpasses virtually every earlier example. The film's power is impossible to extrapolate from its commentary on history and society. One cannot overlook its acknowledgment of environmental degradation associated with progress, its depiction of an indigenous people's ambivalence to whites and their encroachment, and its nuanced grasp of violence, particularly gun violence (not a simple "anti-gun" op-ed, but a beautifully literal rendition of firearms' deployment by people in moments of passion, stupidity, and cold anger).
It is scored by Neil Young, who lets loud, amplified electric guitar strains settle in among the pictures. The music is limited, but effective. It very well punctuates this imaginative Western which includes interesting meditations upon the myth of the frontier, violence, artistic outlaws, and the serious situation of mistreated Native Americans. Blake's arduous journey toward death is a wonder to behold
The movie takes place in a dream state. To drive this home, we see several shots of Blake falling asleep or passing out from pain, hunger or exhaustion. By the end of the film, the images we see are dazed and dreamy.
It is not like any other western. It's not an easy film to watch, and I predict that a lot of people will call it "joyless". But, I also predict that with the passing of time, this movie will settle in and find a place as a cinema classic.

Slow, dark and very cool, Jim Jarmusch's anti-Western movie can attract and at the same time confuse you.

American Identity

Also submitted in:
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Concept of Social Identity:

In sociology and political science, the notion of social identity is defined as the way that individuals label themselves as members of particular groups (e.g., nation, social class, subculture, ethnicity, gender, etc.). It is in this sense that sociologists and historians speak of the national identity of a particular country like American identity.

American Identity:

Traditionally, researchers of American identity have mostly focused on only two components of American identity: liberalism (America as a land of freedom and opportunity) and ethnoculturalism (America as a nation of white Protestants).
In recent years additional dimensions of American identity have been considered. Two newly overlooked elements of American identity are civil republicanism (America as a vibrant participatory democracy with dutiful citizens) and incorporationalism (America as a diverse nation of immigrants).

The content f American identity: Rooted in liberalism

Recent scholarship has identified complex and often competing components of American identity that are rooted in the widely accepted liberal tradition, civic republican tradition, the contested ethnocultural tradition, and the equally contested incorporationist tradition. This perspective has been termed the “multiple tradition” or multiple conceptions model of the content of American identity.
Liberalism, in short, is the image of America that comes most easily to mind when people think about what it means to be American and is widely seen as the defining essence of American political culture. It stresses minimal government intervention in private life and promotes economic and political freedoms along with equality of opportunity.
Ethnoculturalism has also been a defining element of American identity. It sets boundaries on group membership. In its extreme, ethnoculturalism maintains that Americans are white, English-speaking Protestants of northern European ancestry. Over time this tradition has been discredited, but it is far from breathing its last breath.
Civic republicanism emphasizes the responsibilities, rather than the rights of citizenship. It advances the notion that the well being of the community is more than just the sum of individualistic pursuits of private gain. Rather, a vibrant self-governing community needs individual members to act on its behalf. In his view, we should all be involved in social and political life and pursue ends that serve the public good. As Tocqueville noted, pursuing the public good engenders pride and patriotism, which further motivate people to “labor for the good of the state”.
Incorporationalism is a more recent tradition to the set of norms that constitute the content of American identity. The seeds of this tradition were planted nearly a century ago with cultural pluralism, and only in the past few decades have both elites and citizens come to endorse this notion that America’s unique identity is grounded in its immigrant legacy and in its ability to convert the challenges immigration brings into thriving strengths. Ethnoculturalism continues to exist, but it does so alongside an incorporationist challenge that has grown stronger over the years due to many factors, including rights-based movements of the 60s and 70s and the political incorporation of immigrants and their descendents.
The simplicity of incorporationism – the idea that the United States is a nation of immigrants – belies complex beliefs about the balance between unity and diversity. While there are people who advocate one extreme of complete assimilation and others reject the premise of assimilation altogether, most Americans do not fall at these extremes. Incorporationism celebrates Americans ability both to assimilate and maintain difference.
The above mentioned elements can make the concept of American Identity which can be studied and measured each separately and widely.

References:

1. http://www.wikipedia.org/
2. Schildkraut, D.J. (2007, February 20). Defining American Identity in the 21st Century: How much” there” is there? Journal of Politics.

Book Review

Also submitted in Ezine Articles:
http://EzineArticles.com/?id=891481

David Domke, God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the ‘War on Terror’, and the Echoing Press. London and Ann Arbor, Ml: Pluto Press, 2004. 240 pp.

The relationship between politics and media has always been a topic for vast researches. On the other hand the use of religious discourse in addresses and speeches of politicians to back their policies is not a new issue. But what is done in this book that makes is outstanding and different is an analysis of the interconnections among all these three together. Thus David Domke’s book is ideally positioned to cut right into the heart of debates about the modern developments at the intersection of religion, politics and media within the US. According to him, the foreign and domestic foreign developments in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were not only (neo) conservative, but also firmly grounded in a (Christian) religious fundamentalism. Domke argues that the Bush administration has turned a religious worldview into political policy and has created what Domke calls a ‘political fundamentalism’, defined as ‘an intertwining of conservative religious faith, politics, and strategic communication’ (p. 6). The book is also a critique of the Bush administration’s disregard for democracy in the months following the attack.

The introductory chapter of God Willing? identifies four main characteristics of the Bush administration’s communication that were grounded in a conservative religious worldview: (1) a binary concept of reality (apparent in the consistent use of two constructions: good vs. evil and security vs. peril); (2) an obsession with time and demands for immediate action against terrorism(manifest in two beliefs: that action in the here and now is imperative, and that one’s commitment to a certain course of action, if perceived to be God inspired, should be of an enduring nature); (3) declarations about the will of god for the united states and the values of freedom and liberty; and finally (4) an intolerance for dissent(apparent in the administration’s unified voice in public communication, its appeals for other political actors to act with political unity and its harsh criticisms of dissenters). In each of the chapters that follow, one of these characteristics is defined and discussed in detail, with evidence offering its consistent presence in the public communications of the president between 11 September 2001 and 1 may 2003.

In chapter 2 he examines the presence of two binaries in the president’s discourse and news coverage after September 11- good versus evil and security versus peril- and argues that these conceptions of reality reflected and contributed to a sense of moral certitude among the bush administration that was used to justify limits on civil liberties and major preemptive military action while also helping to engender public support for the president and administration’s “war on terror”.

Chapter 3 offers evidence of time fixations throughout the administration’s discourse and news coverage, and argues that they allowed the administration simultaneously to push for immediate action on specific “war on terrorism” policies and to justify this desire as a requisite step in a long-term, God- ordained process. The implication was clear: to not act quickly or to not endure in the campaign against terrorism was to risk another September 11.

In chapter 4 evidence is offered of how the universal gospel of freedom and liberty, offered by the president and echoed by the press, functioned as a central rationale for the administration’s foreign policies, particularly in justifying the new preemptive doctrine and the Iraq war.

Chapter 5 focuses on how the administration’s emphasis upon political unity and harsh rebukes of those dissented worked together to encourage support for the administration, and to suggest that anyone who held opposing views was unpatriotic and potentially placing people in the United States at risk.

Chapter 6 reflects upon the collection of evidence, in three central sections. First, it argues that the Bush administration offers an instructive case study of how political fundamentalism can gain wide support in the United States. The chapter’s second section scrutinizes the role of news media in these processes, with the argument that in a nation-challenging context, commercial mass media are drawn to the discourses of political conservatives, particularly those that are religiously grounded. The final section of the chapter explores how cultural leaders might craft a moral discourse that counters the predominance of political fundamentalism, and why it is crucial for U.S. citizens and others that they do so.

Chapter 7 offers conclusions, focusing on implications of the administration’s political fundamentalism for democracy, both in the United States and globally.

In the way the writer brings a rigorous analysis of a wide range of empirical material, David Domke’s work is of great value to study. However, to what extent his work can contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between religion, politics, and the media is a matter of question. Some scholars may find it the role of religion has been exaggerated. Some scholars may question the way he has analyzed meaning formation and reception in media as it is a subjective matter. Nevertheless, the book very well clarifies how the actions of the Bush administration and the news media are directly counter to fundamental American democratic ideals and principles. It shows how civil religion is used to promote its political goals and to justify self-interest. So "God Willing" is a must-read for anyone who cherishes American democracy, anyone who feels uneasy about the Bush Administration's use of religious images, as well as those who have concerns about the way the press helps Bush advance his agenda. However, the potential and necessity for further discussion on the subject exists that can encourage other scholars.

overview on white house site

On the site of white house http://www.whitehouse.gov/ there is a part related to the history of the white house building itself.Going through this part you can find everything about it from the beginnig up to now. There is information about presidents, first ladies and even the kids. There is also a part dedicated to happenings, holidays and ceremonies. One of the intresting part is the panoramic tours that let you view the white house and west wing through movies. There are several rooms in the buliding with different names and different uses. You can also find photos, essays and anecdotes about it.

Generally providing complete information on the white house, it tries to focus on and present its rich history to the viewer.The speeches made on tours seem so influential, giving information about each detail. what makes it more intresting is presenting the idea that every thing, every furniture, shape, photo, etc. is chosen on purpose and all symbolize the commom aim of the country.

One of the tours that attracts a lot of attention is tour of Oval Office now owned by George W. Bush. There is a brief history on this office that follows:

On an early October morning in 1909, President William Howard Taft became the first President to walk into the Oval Office. Greeting the 27th President of the United States were silk velvet curtains and a checkerboard floor made of mahajua wood from the Philippines. Caribou hide tacked with brass studs covered the chairs in the room. President Taft chose the olive green color scheme.
The Oval Office was different from the office of President Theodore Roosevelt, who built the West Wing in 1902. Roosevelt's office was rectangular. Taft relocated the office and changed its shape to oval, like the Blue Room in the White House.
Preferences for oval rooms date to the time of George Washington. At the president's home in Philadelphia, Washington had two rooms modified with a bowed-end in each that were used for hosting formal receptions called levees. As his guests formed a circle around him, Washington would stand in the center to greet them. With no one standing at the head or foot of the room, everyone was an equal distance from the president. The circle became a symbol of democracy, and Washington likely envisioned the oval Blue Room as the ideal place to host a levee.
For President Taft, the Oval Office may have symbolized his view of the modern-day president. Taft intended to be the center of his administration, and by creating the Oval Office in the center of the West Wing, he was more involved with the day-to-day operation of his presidency than were his recent predecessors.
What President Taft could not imagine in 1909 when he built the Oval Office was that the office itself would become a symbol of the Presidency. Over the years Americans developed a sentimental attachment to the Oval Office through memorable images, such as John Kennedy, Jr. peering through the front panel of his father's desk or President Nixon talking on the phone with astronauts after a successful voyage. Television broadcasts, such as President Reagan's speech following the Challenger explosion, would leave lasting impressions in the minds of Americans of both the office and its occupant.
The Oval Office became a symbol of strength and reassurance the evening of September 11, 2001, when President George W. Bush delivered comforting words through a televised address from the Oval Office. Less than six months later, President George W. Bush welcomed Afghan Interim Authority Hamid Karzai to the Oval Office. The meeting was a sign of significant progress in the war on terrorism.

Watching the tour and listening to the explanations president Bush himself gives can provide you with the impressions one can take about the United States.

More Muslim girls wear scarf in games
By JEFF KAROUB, Associated Press Writer

DEARBORN, Mich. - Dewnya Bakri loves her faith — and the feeling of sinking a three-pointer.
For much of her life, the 20-year-old Muslim has found a way to balance practicing Islam and playing basketball, including wearing a head scarf and long pants on the hardcourt, even if it's meant taunts as she blazed trails on her middle school, high school and college teams.
Now a college senior at University of Michigan-Dearborn preparing for law school, she spends free time coaching Muslim girls and sharing what she experienced in Dearborn, home of at least 40 mosques, to help give them the confidence to follow in her footsteps.
As more covered Muslim girls take up competitive sports, Bakri and others say it's time to get beyond merely allowing the hijab — the traditional Muslim head scarf worn for modesty — and help those wearing them feel welcome.
Experts and advocates say the number of Muslim girls wearing the hijab on the court, track or field is rising because girls are growing more comfortable pursuing mainstream activities while maintaining religious traditions.
"They don't see the barriers," said Edina Lekovic, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council. "They take it for granted they can play in competitive sports ... and work out the clothing issues at the same time."

It is worth considering...
In the U.S., the National Federation of State High School Associations' rules say state associations may allow a player to participate while wearing a head covering for religious reasons as long as it isn't dangerous to another player and unlikely to come off during play. The rule-making federation also allows pants, shorts or skirts.
That's interesting to find out that while in a democrat country you can choose to wear every thing you like to wear and no rule forces you to wear already-chosen clothes, some choose to wear hijab even in sports .

Rice seeks Russian backing on Iran
By MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press Writer

BRUSSELS, Belgium - Armed with support from NATO allies, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will try to convince a skeptical Russia that it should back U.S. plans to step up pressure on Iran to suspend its nuclear activities.
Having won NATO endorsement to stay the course despite a new U.S. intelligence assessment that concludes Iran stopped its atomic weapons development program in 2003, Rice was to meet Friday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who has become the public face of opposition to new U.N. sanctions.

As I pointed out in my first post, opposing nuclear energy program in Iran, the U.S. has been successful in leading two rounds of U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran and is pushing for a third set of economic sanctions if the country refuses to suspend uranium enrichment.
For this purpose they need two more admissions, one from China and one from Russia.
In my first post you read how they tried to convince Chinese to accept but the result was not successful. Still, along with China, which also has opposed new U.N. sanctions, Russia appeared isolated on Iran, which long has denied it is seeking nuclear weapons and crowed that the U.S. intelligence report was a total "victory" for the country.
So they arranged a meeting, this time to have a try on Russians but it seems once more they have been unsuccessful. Because Lavrov on Wednesday said Moscow had not seen any evidence that Iran had, in fact, ever had a nuclear weapons program, not even one that it had given up on four years ago. He also criticized the United States for its missile defense plans.

As it is going on it seems this long story in near its end. May be it is better if the U.S. stop bothering himself more and accept what the others have accepted.

Co-author Book Review

Also submitted in Ezine Articles:
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Me and Miss Sara Sajjadi have written a bookreview that follows:

Stanley Coben, Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America. New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991. 242 pp.

The 1920s in America was a decade of rebellion, reform, and reaction as traditional Victorian values came under attack from all sides. When various groups of intellectuals, blacks, feminists, and dissatisfied economic and political groups assaulted on Victorianism.

Through a descriptive writing style, Stanley Coben goes through the reasons for the tremendous cultural changes during the 1920s and explains them historically. He begins with the concept of Victorian "character," which is a familiar concept for Americans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A character that, as Coben himself defines, was dependably self-controlled, punctual, orderly, hardworking, conscientious, sober, respectful of other Victorians’ property rights, ready to postpone immediate gratifications for long-term goals, pious toward a usually friendly God, a believer in the truth of the Bible, oriented strongly toward home and family, honorable in relations with other Victorians, anxious for self-improvement in a fashion which might appear compulsive to modern observers, and patriotic.

In the following chapters, he illustrates how intelligentsia developed, how intellectuals’ values were changed over time and how it led them inevitably into conflict and then he describes vividly the events that supported the growth of this intellectual subculture. Making it easier to understand he puts the events in a frame of four particularly consequential ones.

The book pays a special attention to cultural matters, showing how art forms of the '20s-like jazz or the novels of Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis-were part of the rebellion. It devotes one whole chapter to describe how the steady flow of black migrants north caused demographic changes and suggested opportunities to them to improve their status and enforce their activities. And then Jazz as one of the most destructive activities of blacks was there to stay as Leopold Stokowski, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, asserted in 1924:

“Jazz has come to stay …and it is useless to fight against it. Already its vigor, its new vitality, is beginning to manifest itself.
The Negro musicians of America are playing a great part in this change. …They are not hampered by traditions or conventions, with their new ideas, their constant experiments, they are causing new blood to flow in the veins of music. In America, I think, lies perhaps the greatest hope in the whole musical world.”

Going through feminist movements and the changes in economic and political order of the country that set the scene for the rebellion, at the end there is a fascinating chapter about the Ku Klux Klan which reveals the Klan as the most visible and powerful guardian of Victorianism during the 1920s.

What makes the whole more thoughtful is the new perspective that Coben brings to show how the contradictions that were the trigger for the rebellion in 1920s still exist, the ones that brought together workers, farmers, socialists, ethnic groups, intellectuals, black leaders, and many feminists.

Coben’s study is of great value particularly for its perfect historical analysis. In fact it has got a refreshing change from most boring history texts. Illustrating the relationship between culture and politics through describing the process of a phenomenon happened in the history of a country like America, he gives the reader a real example that can be contemplated and compared with similar issues. The process through which Coben leads the reader to come to some conclusions and think about present-day issues is designed skillfully and at the same time the way he addresses the existing problems forcefully is appreciable. However it could be better if the idea suggested at the end was developed more to give more evidences to the readers and let them make better judgments. Nevertheless, Rebellion Against Victorianism certainly receives careful attention from scholars and students interested in the intersections between culture and politics, as well as the wider concern about the similar contemporary problems. It can also be a good supplementary text for use in undergraduate courses on 20th-century American history or in American studies courses focusing on twentieth-century cultural development. It will be unfortunate if doesn’t trigger or contribute to a discussion about the effective role of cultural changes in politics and examining the same issues in the present society.

More Young Americans Are Contracting HIV

A large AIDS ribbon hangs from the North Portico of the White House in Washington November 30, 2007, recognizing World AIDS Day which is on December 1. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas (UNITED STATES)

FRIDAY, Nov. 30 (HealthDay News) -- In the 26 years since scientists first spotted AIDS in America, millions of dollars have been poured into outreach efforts aimed at keeping young people clear of HIV, the virus that causes the disease.

But on the eve of World AIDS Day, a disturbing statistical fact has emerged in this country: The number of newly infected teens and young adults is suddenly on the rise.

And the question is, why?
According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 2001 to 2005 (the latest years available), the number of new cases of HIV infection diagnosed among 15-to-19-year-olds in the United States rose from 1,010 in 2001, held steady for the next three years, then jumped 20 percent in 2005, to 1,213 cases.
For young people aged 20 to 24, cases of new infection have climbed steadily, from 3,184 in 2001 to 3,876 in 2005.

Intresting to know...

In January 2003, Bush outlined a five-year strategy for global emergency AIDS relief, the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief as one of his foreign policies.

The President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR/Emergency Plan) is a commitment of $15 billion over five years (2003–2008) from United States to fight the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. As the largest international health initiative ever initiated by one nation to address a single disease, the program hopes to provide antiretroviral treatment (ART) to 2 million HIV-infected people in resource-limited settings, to prevent 7 million new infections, and to support care for 10 million people .

PEPFAR prioritizes resource-limited countries with high HIV/AIDS prevalence rates. The 15 current "focus countries" include Botswana, Cote d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, and Zambia. While most of the $15 billion for this program will be spent on these focus countries, $4 billion is allocated for programs elsewhere, and for HIV/AIDS research. The other $1 billion is contributed to the Global Fund.

To me putting these two together, just leaves a BIG QUESTION MARK ?????????

Baghdad Thanksgiving.2003

By Annia Ciezadlo
Published: November 22, 2007, New York Times

I HAVE always hated Thanksgiving. Christmas, now there was a holiday: food, presents, elves and angels, colored lights. Thanksgiving was clunky and secular, devoid of mystery or ritual yet still reeking of guilt: you didn’t get any presents, but you were supposed to be grateful for something
But in Iraq four years ago, Thanksgiving was all I could think about. I was in Baghdad as a journalist, spending a working honeymoon with my brand-new husband, and homesick. So when an American friend asked me to help her cook the turkey she had imported from Jordan, I set out for Souk al-Ajanib, the foreigners’ market, to hunt for sage.
The Iraqis could spend time with us without having to worry that they would be killed for it. They could satisfy their curiosity about our culture, with its unfathomable holidays, and we could learn about theirs. And while most of them were too smart to say it in public, a lot of Iraqis were happy — you could perhaps even call it grateful — that the United States had gotten rid of Saddam Hussein. [1]

WHAT IS THANKSGIVING?

Thanksgiving, or Thanksgiving Day, is a traditional North American holiday to give thanks, traditionally to God, for the things that one has at the conclusion of the harvest season. Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November in the United states and on the second Monday of October in Canada.

AND...

Three years ago this week, President Bush made a surprise Thanksgiving Day visit to Baghdad, where he told a group of stunned soldiers that the United States did not wage a bloody war to depose Saddam Hossein "only to retreat before a band of thugs and assassins."
Giving a speech ,George W. Bush told:
"Together, you and I have taken an oath to defend our country. You're honoring that oath. The United States military is doing a fantastic job.
You are defeating the terrorists here in Iraq, so that we don't have to face them in our own country. You're defeating Saddam's henchmen, so that the people of Iraq can live in peace and freedom.
By helping the Iraqi people become free, you're helping change a troubled and violent part of the world. By helping to build a peaceful and democratic country in the heart of the Middle East, you are defending the American people from danger and we are grateful. "

CONCLUTION:

It seems three years ago american troops had different conditions in Iraq.They could celebrated Thanksgiving and their supposed victory.

REFRENCES:

[1]:http://www.nytimes.com/

THE REACH OF WAR; This Thanksgiving, Bush Team and Iraq Leaders Face Range of New Realities (November 23, 2006)
A REGION INFLAMED; Bush's View of Future of Iraq: 'Seize the Moment, Rebuild' (November 28, 2003)

China tells U.S. it opposes a nuclear-armed Iran
But Pentagon officials, including Gates, make no headway in Beijing on sanctions or stopping military sales to Iran.


BEIJING -- China's military leadership on Monday assured U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that it opposes a nuclear-armed Iran.
But to the disappointment of Pentagon officials, on a visit here for talks on a range of military issues between the two countries, it appears the Chinese position on Iran's nuclear development, for now, will be no more than words.
Chinese military officials told their American counterparts that they believe "discussion" alone -- as opposed to economic sanctions -- will dissuade Iran from building a nuclear weapon. Gates will make the case for sanctions once more today, when he meets with Chinese President Hu Jintao.
"That is where you get your real answers," said a senior Defense official. "I continue to hope that on Iran we would get a stronger understanding of the importance of using all the tools of diplomacy, not just discussions, but sanctions and pressure. Just talking hasn't gotten us very far with Iran."
Chinese military leaders said nothing of U.S. requests that they stop selling military supplies to Iran.
Iran's nuclear program is one of the most urgent issues for Gates inChina. The Iranian issue was raised and the two sides "agreed that it is important to pursue efforts to persuade the Iranian government to change their behavior and their policies peacefully, through diplomatic means," Gates said. [1]

But why one of the most urgent issues?

During previous months, Washington passed a new round of unilateral sanctions against Iran over the country’s nuclear program and is pushing for a third set of U.N. Security Council sanctions as well.But Iran has dismissed the sanctions and refuses to agree to international demands that it suspend uranium enrichment, which can produce fuel for a nuclear reactor or fissile material for a bomb.
On the other hand,with oil above $95 a barrel, there are limits to how much pressure the U.S. is willing to place on Iran's petroleum sector to influence a persistent nuclear standoff, analysts say.
The dilemma is pretty clear for the world's largest energy consuming nation that taking more aggressive action risks hurting America's economy, while enriching Iran's, but Washington hopes that associating these sanctioned oil-services companies with the Revolutionary Guards will persuade oil producers in other countries -- especially in China and Europe -- to cut off ties.

So...

On saturday,Robert Gates, U.S. defense secretary, left to make his first trip to china.He was schedueled to meet with a number of top chinese leaders, including president Hu Jintao , Cao Gangchuan, Chinese defense minister and Beijing , chinese military leadership.
He was so much interested to bring up the Iranian issue. "We think China could do more on Iran," said one of the officials, adding that the U.S. and China have a common responsibility to do what is necessary to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability.
The U.S. is looking for China to recognize that weapons it sells to Iran have shown up in other countries - such as Iraq. "There is clear evidence that the Chinese can't trust Iran to behave responsibly with any weapons that they sell them," said the official. "That, in our view, should lead China to the conclusion that they shouldn't sell any weapons to Iran."

Conclusion :

Both the United States and China are veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council.
But while Washington is seeking tougher U.N. sanctions on Iran, China -- which sources about 12 percent of its oil there -- favors talks to resolve the issue of its nuclear program.
China's Foreign Ministry said Beijing and Washington had common goals on Iran.
"We both believe Iran should not have nuclear weapons and we also both believe in safeguarding the Non-Proliferation Treaty," Liu Jianchao told a regular news conference.
But he added: "China believes we should emphasize dialogue and negotiation between relevant parties."

It seems that, in terms of Iran issuse, Americans haven't been successful to find a strong agreement in China.

References:
http://www.yahoonews.com/
http://www.theworldlink.com/
http://www.cnews.com/
http://www.elpasotimes.com/

[1] http://www.latimes.com/