In “An ‘American’ Publishes a Magazine” by Wallace Shawn, Shawn discussed the matter of pictures surfacing to the United States public showing American soldiers torturing people. Yet in a matter of weeks, the topic became simply something that gets covered up in dust within time, with the government and the citizens accepting it for what it was. From this, Shawn proceeds to queston what it meant to be “Americans and living in the United States” (50). He isn’t exactly someone you can call an American patriot, he simply states that he was born in the United States and that was that, he was an American. The “boring men” as Shawn calls them, refers to the men that was getting things done “behind the scenes.” In truth, there are many things happening within our country that aren’t exactly clean and full of sunshine and there are always people, the “boring men”, that are going to get the job done.