Let me start with an audio quality comment - I was luckily to be listening to this story while on a walk outside of town. Yes, I had to press my ipod's "30 second rewind" button every time a car drove by, but overall, I could hear the entire thing, which I don't think I could have done anywhere where there was a background noise.
As for the actual story - well, the story itself was great. Really great. I really loved the multi-layering of the story, how each sub-tale introduced a different aspect of American history and interwove them into a cohesive whole, forming the American present. It is a rare, yet wonderful, story where the final point - stories shape who we are more than actions - is not just said, but actually demonstrated by the very story we were listening to.
And yet -- And this is a big, yet personal, "and yet" -- and yet, it does not really work for me. Because, I am *not* an American. This story isn't about shaping my cultural heritage, it's about shaping someone else's cultural heritage. All the "we"'s in the above paragraph were a lie - I am not included. And this was brought very much to life by the fact that my actual history - the history of my country, my people - shows up in the story. My culture, my past, the right and wrongs committed to and by my parents, are a cautionary headline in a newspaper you show to a ghost so that the two of you can agree that hey, America may be built on a past of violence and bigotry, but at least we're not those guys, right? And just like that, it all came down crashing around me, and I suddenly realized - why am I buying into this? Why am I buying into a discourse that tells me that the lines of racism are drawn between distinctions like black, white, Mexican, native American, when none of those categories mattered to me when I grew up - and trust me, racism was everywhere in my upbringing, but the categories were very different. Why is it that I am listening, over and over, to a media that tells me that American issues and troubles are more important than my own?
And then I calmed down, and realized that the story is called "a tale from the 1001 american nights", and that at least it's honest about it's perspective. And it is a wonderful story, on many levels.
But yeah. It's never a lot of fun to discover that you've been reduced to a footnote in someone else's story.