Soegijono 1

Daphne Soegijono

Brian Garland

Basic Composition 100

November 6, 2008

Title

Human beings rarely show others how they feel directly. Instead, they would

create other things that represent how they feel. Sometimes, things around a person will express

how he/she feels. Therefore, things around us would change depending on how we feel and how

we see things. In the essay “Dinosaur Dreams”, Jack Hitt explains to us that dinosaur and its

discoveries can become representations of America’s historical evolutions. On the other hand,

Fenton Johnson’s essay “Wedded to an Illusion” tells us about how our perception of marriage

follows the evolution of the problems that we face in our lives. The evolution of dinosaur

discoveries and marriage are representations of America itself. The national issues and historical

events affect people’s perception of dinosaurs and concept of marriages.

Every little thing around us can be seen as a representation of who we are or how

we feel. From Hitt’s essay, we can learn that dinosaur discoveries are a representation of America

itself. Hitt writes in his essay, “Dinosaurs are distinctly American, not only because our scholars

have so often been at the forefront of fossil discoveries and paleontological theory but because

the popular dinosaur is a wholly owned projection of the nationalist psyche of the United States”

(Hitt 128). Hitt explains that how we approach fossil discoveries and paleontological theory

depend on what is happening in our society. This is because what is going on around us affects

how we feel, and how we feel also affects how we approach the things around us. We can quote

Johnson’s essay for an example: “the early Catholic Church restricted divorce partly as a means

of protecting women and children from easy abandonment” (Johnson 158). During that time,

people feel that women and children need better protection. Marriages and divorces are

obviously not their only problem at that moment, and there might be bigger ones. People will
 Soegijono 2
look into anything concerning women and children to find things than can be changed for the

better, and restricting divorce is one of the solutions.

Because the things around us become representations of ourselves, they change

according to how we feel and what we want. As human beings we have the control over almost

everything around us. We have the ability to change things to be the way we want them to be.

Throughout Johnson’s essay we learn that marriage has always been changing from generation to

generation. That is because marriage represents who we are at that moment. “Marriage has

always been an evolving institution, bent and shaped by the historical moment and the needs and

demands of its participants” (Johnson 157). The concept of marriage is changing, depending on

how our society wants it to be. We change marriage to how we want it to represent ourselves in

society and to fit our perception of what marriage really means. The same can be said about how

we see dinosaurs. “The early curators had to smash and whittle T. rex’s bones and then remove

vertebrae to assemble him into that fighting posture. ‘There was more Barnum than science in

those earliest displays,’ Horner says. ‘The curators realized it was a spectacle for the nation, and

that’s why T. rex looked the way he did. It was what the country wanted to see’” (Hitt 130).

According to Hitt’s essay, we picture dinosaurs the way we want to see them, instead of

scientifically. It might not be how it really was but we are more satisfied when things agree with

our perception. Therefore, how we picture things influence what they mean in our lives.

Human beings tend to be stubborn about what they believe in and what they want

to see. Everyday we learn something new, but we don’t believe in all of the new things we learn.

Once we believe in something, some people tend to stick to it and believe that it is the truth,

nothing else is. Johnson writes in his essay: “those who take as gospel the rules they have been

taught rather than open their eyes to the reality in which they live, who witness love and yet deny

its full expression” (Johnson 162). Johnson writes about people that he considers

“overeducated”. We often think that we know better than we actually do. We feel that what we

know and what we believe is always the truth. Therefore, we end up living under this illusion: a

world that we create ourselves, ignoring the facts that are contradicting our beliefs. An example
 Soegijono 3
can be drawn from Hitt’s essay. The majority of people see T. rex as this big and terrifying

carnivore. Paleontologist Jack Horner found otherwise. While T. rex is still a carnivore, it is not a

predator. It is not as terrifying and strong as people picture it to be. Even with all the facts that

Horner found, people tend to stick with what they know. “Horner has nothing but critics, and

they resist his logic with the willful stubbornness of biblical creationists weighing the merits of

evolutionary theory. They will admit that T. ambulated like a monstrous sandpiper, but they insist

he was still a predator, dammit” (Hitt 129). People want to see T. rex as the best predator in the

dinosaur world. Even if that’s not the truth, we make ourselves believe that it is. We ignore the

facts that say otherwise. We see things from our own perspectives, even if there are other

perspectives that have more truth.

Because we change things to how we want them to be, they become a part of us.

Our feelings and thoughts affect our decisions. In a way, everything that we touch has a sense of

our identity in them. The things around us change following the changes in ourselves, so they

also become a part of our identity. America has always been the world’s superpower as well as

the leading country in paleontology and dinosaur discoveries. “But there was another side of this

revival. At the time, America’s status as superpower, as well as keeper of dinosaurs, was

beginning to be challenged by China” (Hitt 137). Dinosaur has always been a part of Americans.

This is because everything leading to their discovery and emergence in pop culture has always

started in America. To most people, dinosaur is America’s identity. This identity effect goes both

ways, too. If dinosaur identifies America, people give marriage its identity. Johnson writes in his

essay that the concept of marriage is identified by anyone who is a part of it. “Marriage is a

union between a man and a woman because that is how most people define the word, however

unjust this may be for same-gender couples who wish to avail themselves of its rights” (Johnson

160). Perhaps now we can see more homosexuals who fight for their equality of rights as

heterosexuals. Still, most people will identify marriage as something that is between a man and a

woman. If you are asked to think about a wedding, you will see a groom – a man in a nice tuxedo

– and a bride – a woman in a white gown. This is the stereotype of a marriage; a man and a
 Soegijono 4
woman who want to build a family together. We identify things as we what we want them to

represent. On the other hand, the same things become a part of our identity because they

represent us.

Since we identify the things around us, and they identify us, everything around us

becomes a part of us. Marriage has become a part of our life and our culture. Johnson writes in

his essay, that according to most people marriage is the foundation of a family. “With marriage as

its cornerstone, this idealized unit forms the foundation for virtually all American legislation

concerning the family” (Johnson 158). Our society sees that to become a family, two people,

male and female, have to be married. That is the base of a family. In a way, marriage is seen to be

a part of our culture, because marriage builds a family, and families build our society. Similarly,

in Hitt’s essay we can find that dinosaurs are also still a part of our lives, even though they

became extinct millions of years ago. “They have done a lot of heavy lifting, culturewise.

Besides in children’s narratives (where dinosaurs still rule the world), they have served as

political totems, deranged kitsch, icons of domesticated terror, cultural mules for Darwin’s (still)

troubling theory, and environmental Cassandras resurrected to act out her famous final words, ‘I

will endure to die’” (Hitt 128). As Hitt explains throughout his essay, dinosaurs have become a

part of our lives. It is a part of America’s pop culture, representing its historical events. It is also

an example of Darwin’s theory on evolution.