Contributors >> Weisman, Peter Aaron ('99)
Biographical statement (March 2009)
After graduating from Lehigh in 1999, Peter Weisman lived in New York for one year before traveling to Spain. This was during the first days of the Bush administration. He returned from his travels after nine months, drove to Arizona, and attended graduate school at ASU, graduating in 2003 with a Masters in American Literature. His area of specialization was Godlessness Humor and its correlation to Darwinism in the literature of Ernest Hemingway. After graduate school, Peter lived in Antwerpen, Belgium, for five months before coming directly back to New York. He became a commercial real estate broker in Manhattan, selling buildings and leasing retail-related property primarily in Soho. He is also a landlord in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he lives.
Reflection
Reel American History remains the most valid scholarly project of which I have been a part. It is relevant to our development as a nation and a people. It underscores perception, as opposed to fact, as the proactive role history has in our lives. How we remember things shapes how we act.
My project, The Molly Maguires, dealt exclusively with three things:
- ethnicity
- terrorism
- labor relations (before labor rights during the birth of the industrial revolution)
The terrorism were actions ranging from beatings to murder to wholesale bombings of coal mines. It was ethnic, reflecting the discrimination against the Irish Catholics of 1860's and 1870's America.
What drew me was a high school history teacher who had shown my class the film during our senior year. It was a natural choice for the project. I suppose given my half-Irish, half-Jewish status, I have a lobotomized sense of ethnicity. I am white, American, not Jewish, not not-Jewish, not Irish, not not-Irish... So that really had very little to do with the selection. It was also attractive because it is a rough-and-tumble subject, lending itself almost to an "Irish Mafia." In a world without labor rights, and greedy piggish-capitalists working men, women and children like slaves, it also seemed an important part of our American history. If you look at our history in regards to labor relations, it is a violent, bloody, unfair, tooth-and-claw struggle. Every inch of this nation was fought over and covered in blood; the same with every resource.
My views have evolved since I was a part of this course. Where before I might have waxed socialist, I now understand every system is part of the same monstrosity -- human kind. There is no ideal structure. If the Irish Catholics had been on top, would things have really been different? There is a gravity to that question that forces the most-obvious of answers -- not really. From the fraternities on the hill to the imaginary boundaries that divide nations, we are constantly grouping up together in clans and beating the shit out of each other. That's why I knew Iraq would never be a "peaceful, free, united" nation. I don't see this pattern of behavior ever ending.
America does have some true gifts, such as our nationalism. In most nations, if you are a nationalist, you are unavoidably going to encounter racism, because most nations are one race. Here, our nationalism is a celebration of diversity. But somehow we still find ways to divide into groups. As far as labor rights, we've cured that problem -- now we have illegal immigrants who have no rights, or we don't even have labor (we outsource labor to other countries). (I think it's a profound failure of the Baby Boomers, ultimately.)
