Norman Morrison

I received my summer blogs back today from Mr. Delacruz. I have to say I am disappointed on how they turned out. I thought I performed better than what my grade represents. While it is not a bad grade, I was just hoping it would be higher. I can deduce that maybe it was the summer heat that drained my brain of any English coherence and spark? Looking back on summer now, I had so much free time compared to the school year! How could I have not dedicated more time to my blogs?

I am also very disappointed in myself in regards to the extra credit that was offered during the summer reading blog. I failed to do it! Had I known it would account for 100 additional points, I would’ve been all over it! I suppose I can once again blame the lethargy and heat of the summer on my failure to accrue a large chunk of extra points on the summer blog assignment. What a shame.

Despite my disappointment over my summer reading blog grade, I enjoyed looking over the different poems that were based off the Norman Morrison incident. Out of the three poems we looked at, I liked Adrian’s Mitchell’s work the best. I felt so much passion in his writing. He begins the pome titled Norman Morrison with the sarcastic line “United beautiful States of terrible America”. He turns this common phrase into a more ironic sequence of words as he shows Morrison’s disrespect for the US Government and their involvement in Vietnam. Adrian Mitchell then goes on to say Morrison’s publicized burning represents all of the undocumented burning in Vietnam when he writes, “He did it in Washington where everyone could see because people were being set on fire in the dark corners of Vietnam where nobody could see.” In this line, Morrison becomes a symbol of those who have been set ablaze in Vietnam.

Mitchell beautifully wraps up his poem with the sentence, “He simply burned away his clothes, his passport, his pink-tinted skin, put on a new skin of flame and became Vietnamese.” I believe this to mean in the act of burning himself, Morrison stripped away all that made him American, and he became one with the Vietnamese. Morrison was experiencing their pain, and made his point about Vietnam in a rather passionate, gruesome, and admirable way. I also noticed that Mitchell did not use an oxford comma in the sequence of events about Morrison burning himself. What a sly dog! I am going to go ahead and pat myself on the back for that one.