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#the nuclear family is such a terrible idea and American capitalism makes everything about it worse
mashkaroom · 3 years
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Was talking today with someone who mentioned that they had moved out of their mother's house and live with their grandma bc of a variety of issues, including being trans, and I, thinking of my own relationship with my mother and how I would have moved out at like any moment starting age 12 if that was an option, said "oh good for you", which was fine in this particular case but NOT actually the appropriate reaction LMAO
#any time anyone is like 'i was low-key kicked out of my house but was able to find a good housing situation almost immediately' I'm like#god i wish that were me#i guess that's kind of what happened w my dad? tho i don't think it really counts if your parents are divorced and you're going to college#kids with moms who are honestly fine not abusive just. completely incompatible with your happiness rise up#if anybody has any suggestions on how to say 'i want you to be way less involved in my life' without making your mother really upset#i was like 'i got my neurology reference! hopefully i will be able to telehealth soon'#and she was like 'i wish you had done this sooner so i could also go to the appointment'#and i looked into the camera like i was on the office#but the thing is she got really upset last week that it seems like both me & bro don't want to hang out with her that much#and i was like ???? so you ARE picking up on those vibes???#i think the issue is the following: when my mother is like. telling us to do things or yelling at us#for her that doesn't register as interaction/spending time together#so she's done with work and is like 'now i want to spend time with children'#and I'm like 'wow i have had way too much interaction with mother already i cannot handle anymore'#but i don't know how to tell her this without being like. '50% of my interactions with you are completely unbearable to me.#and like once a week i have to play like 7 sudokus before bed to calm the blind rage inside of me#lol#the nuclear family is such a terrible idea and American capitalism makes everything about it worse#i feel so bad for disliking my mother as much as i do bc the feeling is obviously not reciprocated#if this were any other relationship i would cut it off#but i know that it would be way more devastating to her than it would be helpful to me#especially once i move out#so 🤷🏻‍♀️
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aelaer · 3 years
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☕ The fact that Wakanda was presented as an advanced country looking down on others from it's comfortable vibranium armchair but had a monarchist system that could place a ruler with 100% muscles and 0% brains at the head, along with other bothersome stuff like that, like Shuri being the head of the government's science department while she is a part of the royal family, or really, every single part of Wakanda that looks good on paper - a king with a council of people leading the different tribes - but that history has shown us very often ends up creating a dictatorship, which is really what happened in the movie and I'm surprised no one sees it.
Like, the movie literally shows us this country that's supposedly so advanced, with spies and people placed around the world, most likely putting their fingers in as many pies as possible, and an incredibly developed technology - which is frightening on many levels considering that UN or no Wakanda could blow up everything outside of its borders and people wouldn't know it until it happened -, but with a monarchist - and whatever other words could define it - governmental system that has revealed a lot of problems in its configuration. The tribes leader were literally being choked in the throne room and no one was doing anything, there was a destruction of a historical, scientific and cultural heritage being condoned by the new religious ceremony leader(???) just because the king ordered it. They would've literally tried taking over the entire non-black population (and where does that leave all the metis people? All the ones that are not white, but not black? Of middle eastern descendance? Of Asian one? Etc?) if the ex-monarch hadn't done something.
What I'm trying to ask if, what do you think of Wakanda being a good idea on paper but terrible in practice? True! Untrue? Something else?
Holy shit lady, you ask the tough questions. This is a difficult subject to cover - you’re asking me to look at the political structure of a fictional society within a disenfranchised continent - and I’m uncertain if it’s possible to do a decent analysis without addressing heavy topics. Basically, I don’t want to sound like a privileged dickwad. So I guess what I can say is - this comes from someone with a (mostly decent) American-based education, and no formal study of pre-colonial customs and political structures in Africa. I apologise for any misconstrued ideas and more than welcome any corrections to those who know more about these subjects!
I like Wakanda on paper, mostly due to the fact that the majority of Africa got completely screwed in terms of historical treatment and I’m rooting for the continent’s people to gain their own voices again. Wakanda being such a huge thing in international popular culture might serve as an inspiration for someone who ends up being important to at least one country there. In that sense, I really like Wakanda - the idea that it can potentially inspire historically disenfranchised cultures in the real world. How practical that thought is, I’m not sure - I might just be too idealistic.
Dictatorships can happen in non-monarchies as well, which you know -- as the most famous examples in 20th century history are not monarchies. The issue that can appear in monarchies -- or dictatorships -- is the lack of checks and balances to help keep those in power from going overboard (or the populace not having enough manpower/arms to get a dictator-like-coup out, but that’s an entirely different discussion!)
From what we got in the movie, Wakanda does seem to lack those checks and balances and no ability to overrule a king’s command. It seemed that they never had any sort of Magna Carta in their history (which is far from a perfect document, but did start the precedent of limiting monarchical power), and it doesn’t seem there’s anything resembling a representative government with veto power over the leader that you see in, what, 2/3rds of the world these days? (I legit have no idea, but I do know it’s wide-spread.)
But why wouldn’t they have such a document limiting monarchical power or some sort of democratic process? The modern mindset across many countries around the world leans towards democracy and elected, representative governments. But it can’t be denied that colonialism helped spread this, as -- at least, according to wiki -- representative democracy/liberal democracy/Western democracy all originate in Europe. So, in some way it makes sense that they didn’t transition yet because they were never colonized, and they were completely self-contained so didn’t have any of the outside world conflicts to force them to make changes. France helped fund the barons who pushed for the Magna Carta. France was also responsible for helping fund/arm the US in their fight to gain independence (lol France vs England history, it’s so great). External conflicts with other regions/countries caused *changes* to happen in those societies, at least from what I know of European history. Possibly happened in other continents, but I’m just not knowledgeable enough about their histories to give specific examples.
Wakanda had no outside conflict, and with no outside conflict, you get one major source of problems eliminated. Civil wars happen for a multitude of reasons, but perhaps one of their solutions historically for kingship changing without civil war was the fight of a representative of a tribe to try and win it over. Who knows? But when you’re enclosed like Wakanda was, there’s a lot less chance of things changing.
(On that note - their selection of a new leader is also incredibly disproportionately unfair to women. The average man is physiologically stronger and faster than the average woman. It’s just--biology. But who knows, maybe Wakanda was the same as much of the rest of the world in terms of their thoughts of women leading in politics. There’s comic canon that could be different, but the MCU did a lot of changes from comic canon.)
A *lot* of things changed across the world in the 20th century, making the world much smaller. Before the 20th century, it was likely considered completely useless and nonviable to make war on other nations because, though they were more technologically advanced, it’s incredibly unlikely they had something akin to nuclear bombs in the 19th century. They had to have their own steps of progression. And if they were only *a bit* better, they couldn’t stop the entire world if they started attacking and word spread. It’s only in the late 20th, early 21st century that things like destroying the rest of the world with Wakandan weaponry was likely actually feasible. Though honestly? I don’t think that shield could withstand a nuke. I just don’t see it. If Erik’s plan went through, he may have doomed Wakanda's capital city to being utterly annihilated because too many countries do have the ultimate kill button, and there are some who would not hesitate to use it.
It also could be cultural. Wakanda didn’t go conquering their neighbors left and right. They were happy with five tribes and it seemed to remain five tribes. That speaks of something deeply cultural, deep within the roots of how they’re raised and taught. Erik came from an entirely different culture with a violent childhood and background, and because they were in the 21st century, other Wakandans could *learn* of the rest of the world, and get new ideas - and get the same anger that stirs war and revolutions, and ultimately can affect a country’s culture.
So perhaps before the 21st century, limited power with the king wasn’t needed simply due to their isolation. Now, though that they are much more connected with the world, maybe they need something more like Botswana or Nigeria, only tied in with a monarchy (according to wiki -- Elsewhere, in Botswana, the kgosis (or chieftains) of the various tribes are constitutionally empowered to serve as advisors within the national legislature as members of the Ntlo ya Dikgosi. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the various traditional polities that currently exist are politically defined by way of the ceding of definite authority from the provincial governments, which in turn receive their powers to do so from a series of chieftaincy laws that have been legislatively created.)
So basically what I’m trying to say is, while I’m personally super gung ho about representative democracies and individual liberties, that’s not necessarily the culture of Wakanda and it may not fit for them. But *what* the culture of Wakanda evolves into, being more open to the rest of the world -- and thus, the rest of the world’s ideas and cultures, remains to be seen. They may find that they do need to reform their political structure after the civil war we saw in the first film, though, and perhaps they do so.
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ari-nemera · 5 years
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Hey, so I just finished Stranger Thing Season 3, and well, I feel I need to debunk the entire ‘capitalist propaganda’ bullshit I’ve been seeing warnings for since the season first aired, and why I would argue that it isn’t anti-communist in a modern sense as well.
Without spoiling anything for would-be watchers, I will say that (while this should be obvious) Stranger Things takes place during the 1980′s, which was during the nuclear scare caused by the stupid rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union. Season 3 relies on anti-Russian sentiment during the time period to recreate a relatively classical ‘evil commies’ plot (ST is, at its heart, an homage to 80′s horror), but with a eldritch Stranger Things(TM) twist.
I am explaining this because if you know anything about a combo of historical accuracy and the Soviet Union, it isn’t anti-communist propaganda. The Soviet Union was a farce and a thinly veiled dictatorship based around oppression of the working class, and even today, modern communists make a point of stressing their lack of ideological similarities to the SU when questioned by the uneducated. The ‘commies’ in this season have nothing in common with neo-communist thinking, and anyone who knows anything about history would understand this immediately.
Now, in order to debunk the pro capitalism bullshit I’ve been seeing, I will need to spoil minor things about characters/ the plot, so if you haven’t watched the third season, but want to have your concerns based on terrible rumors appeased, be prepared to have some small spoilers. (nothing plot-breaking)
OK- TO START:
There are exactly three instances in which capitalism is mentioned/ alluded to in this season, and I will list them and describe them in order.
First: Hawkins gets a new mall. This mall, like many at the time (thanks ST for the historical accuracy), causes the death of Hawkins downtown small businesses. This is framed as a bad thing. Everyone who owns a business downtown who has lost their store does a picket protest outside of the Mayor’s office. (he funded the Mall)
The Mayor, a minor villain in the season, calls in Hopper to try and convince him to chase away the protestors. Hopper isn’t happy with this idea and argues that it’s their right to protest. (notice that this is the main character saying this) The mayor then uses Capitalism as an excuse for why everyone protesting doesn’t matter, it’s just business! (oh hey, this is being said by the villain.) and Hopper is disgusted.
But the mayor threatens hopper and uses ‘they need a permit to protest’ to force Hopper to make them leave. (something it’s heavily implied Hopper doesn’t want to do, but feels pressured into because of his job)
Already, Capitalism is being framed as unfair and cruel to the working class. it is used as an excuse by a man in power to try and convince a good character (without success) that his terrible actions are Good Actually, but in reality it’s destroying the town’s economy.
Second: A new main character is introduced! It’s Lucas’ little sister, Erica.  We’ve seen her infamously bratty character in previous seasons. In this season, she gets pulled into the spotlight because of her size. Steve, Robin (another new character whom I love), and Dustin need someone small enough to crawl through a vent. She happens upon their secret scheme, and is indoctrinated into their little plan.
After manipulating them into giving her ice cream, they beg her to do it because  “it will save the world”. She seems unconvinced. (she’s already been framed as manipulative and selfish) Dustin, in desperation, asks her if she loves America. She replies by snarking “Yeah! You can’t spell America without Erica!” and goes on to explain that She “loves Capitalism! Do you know how capitalism works? people can be be bought for goods and services. and you will have to buy my services.” This is seen as frustrating and shallow by the main cast, who can’t understand why just saving the world isn’t good enough. Let me repeat, her love of capitalism negatively frames her as the selfish and obtuse one. Her use of pro-capitalism rhetoric is seen as a roadblock, and is not treated like a good thing.
From that point on, Erica is cast as an antihero. She is not interested in doing good for the sake of being a good person. She is seen as someone everyone else must work around in order to do anything with any moral weight. She literally will not help them until she gets paid in ice cream. While she goes on to develop herself in other ways, (and her snark is fun and v likeable at times) Dustin literally only compliments her understanding of different systems of government once (as it’s framed as a weird thing for her to have any understanding of) and never comments on her love of capitalism specifically in a positive light. He uses her smarts to call her a nerd.
Finally: This is probably the most spoiler filled section. Sorry. :/  Another new character, Alexi, is a Russian scientist who can’t speak a lick if English and his relationship with the cast is honestly fucking hilarious. He’s a hostage who wants to keep it that way. He wants to become an American. it’s like, the most classic ‘I want to escape my horrible commie life and live Free(TM)’ plot, but even then, America isn’t treated like some great country. His one friend, Murray (the same from season 2, and the only American who can speak Russian) Unhandcuffs him and takes him to the 4th of July fair while they’re waiting on some other characters.
There, while he’s purchasing Alexi tickets, he mockingly brags about how all the games at the fair are rigged, and that all the money from the poor is fed into the rich’s pockets through tricks and manipulation: “THAT- is America!” he exclaims. Murray is already someone we know hates and distrusts the government. In the context of his character, this is not a positive statement. He is dripping with sarcasm.
While he is clearly portrayed as excited about the idea of Alexi becoming an American citizen, this excitement is not about America itself. He says this as if to warn Alexi that if he wants to be American, he’ll have to put up with everything that entails. Alexi treats this with incredulity, (whaaaaat the games are riiiggged??? no way!) and goes to try and prove Murray wrong. :/ things go downhill from there.
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So anyway, this season is pretty blatantly anti-capitalist???? wtf??? Where did you guys get ANY of the pro-capitalism I kept hearing about?? There isn’t any! Capitalism is clearly being mocked every time it gets brought up. None of these situations would leave the audience being happy with capitalism.
If you want a real complaint, why the fuck did they make Lucas do a fucking Coke commercial in the middle of the goddamn CLIMAX. *internal screaming*
ok but all things aside, this season is p gorey. super triggering honestly. (you want to see a pile of bloody guts move like a slug???? no??? don’t watch this season. seriously. they went for accuracy there and it’s... a lot. I had actual nausea during some of the later episodes.)
As far as pros- It is waaay better and more cohesive than season 2 tho! I really liked it! Max and Steve really shine in this season, and everyone gets some pretty great character development. Hopper is just, the ultimate dad in this season.  (Oh, but Will’s life sucks. Why can’t this boy ever be allowed any happiness. His character arc is best describes as ‘Serious Gay Angst and Longing’. I want Will’s entire family to just have a vacation to goddamn Disney World)
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betsynagler · 5 years
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Critical Thinking is Hard
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I’m lucky: I grew up in a family where thinking was encouraged. My parents treated me and my brother like we were brilliant, which makes you want to be brilliant, and come up with your own ideas. They liked to talk about stuff, and, while they definitely treated us like kids, they also didn’t really shelter us too much. My mother was always ruining TV shows for me by pointing out the sexist moments in television, from reruns of The Brady Bunch and Star Trek, to Charlie’s Angels, Three’s Company and, well, it was the 70s and 80s, so pretty much all TV shows. But they still let us watch them, as well as R-rated movies which may not have been age-appropriate, and while they told us not to smoke pot, when we found out that they smoked pot, they gave us reasons for why it was okay for them and not us (since they “weren’t going to have any more children,” which seemed to make sense at the time). Another thing they did was encourage us to take responsibility for our own decisions from a fairly young age, which meant that you could stay up until 10 or 11 pm on a school night if you really wanted to, but it’d be your fault when you felt like shit all the next day. One can debate the pros and cons of this method of child-rearing (pro: de-mystifying drug use and other taboo behaviors to the degree that they actually start to seem uncool; encouraging kids to develop strong ethical compass and think through their actions; con: kids are even more weird compared to their peers, and precociously develop anxiety and guilt about their own actions). Nevertheless, it did start me on the road to learning the value of thinking for myself.
I didn’t really come into my own as a critical thinker until junior high, however, when I spent two years in a program for gifted students. First, isolation from my peers at a time when I was supposed to be learning the social skills of adulthood and the bullying that naturally flowed from that taught me to look for other people’s faults as a means of self-defense. That made me critical, if not necessarily thoughtful. But then I also had two years of Mr. Snyder teaching me social studies. Many of us in the gifted program had all of the same teachers for all of our academic subjects two years running. This meant that we got to know those teachers really well, and, in the case of Mr. Snyder, came to greatly admire and be shaped by his worldview. Mr. Snyder wasn’t an obvious candidate for intellectual guru to early adolescents. He wasn’t particularly handsome, and he’d had polio as a child and walked with a prominent limp. But he was funny and charismatic, gave terrific lectures that were like brilliant comedy monologues or TED talks, and knew how to make his students feel smart and special — in part because we had made it into his class, but still. We liked him so much that several of us would get to class early every day so that we could draw cartoons of him on the blackboard with clever word bubble-jokes, and he loved that. Too see him come into the room and look at our clever depictions of him and smile and make jokes right back at us, to feel appreciated for our intelligence and creativity, a sensation could be hard to come by as a suburban New Jersey youngster, was wonderful. The class was a mutual admiration society and a bit of a cult of personality that I think hugely affected all of us who took it.
I learned a lot there, as we studied political systems, geography and the history of the ancient world, among other things. We were assigned projects that were unlike anything you’d typically get in junior high or even high school, a combination of fun, self-driven exploration, and out-of-control amounts of work. We had to make a map of the world that included every single country, city, major mountain range and body of water, using color-coded overlays — something that I would have enjoyed, and sort of did, except that, since I was in 7th grade, I was terrible at judging how long it would take and left it until the last minute, and had to repeatedly re-letter the smudged plastic to make it readable in my 12-year-old handwriting. The following year, when we did separate units on Greece and Rome, we had to either fill in an entire outline that he provided with a paragraph or more on every subject, or do a handful of more creative projects designed to help us probe the topics in more interesting detail. After choosing to do the outline for Greece, thinking it would be easier, and ending up with several pounds of handwritten paper (I could not type) on everything from Sparta to Socrates to Doric columns that was probably 75+ pages long, Mr. Snyder had stared at the pile and admitted to me that he hadn’t really expected anyone to choose that option, that he’d made the outline so absurdly long to encourage people to do the creative projects. I probably got an A more because he didn’t want to read the whole damn thing than anything else, and on Rome, I did the projects, like going to a Roman-Catholic service and writing about it — which I did by interviewing my Catholic friend, Tara, instead of actually going to the service myself — or going to the Met to observe and then expound upon the differences one observed between the Greek and Roman statues — which I did after 15 minutes of taking furious notes on a Sunday when we arrived just as they were getting ready to close. Just because I loved Mr. Snyder didn’t mean that I, like any other kid, wasn’t always trying to get out of doing homework in any way I could.
The thing I learned and remember best, however, was not the facts, but the method. We had a class about political and economic systems — communism, socialism, capitalism, authoritarianism — and the first thing Mr. Snyder did was define these terms for us, explaining that they weren’t what we’d been told they were. Specifically, “communism,” the way it was looked at in the budding Reagan Era of the early 1980s, wasn’t actually communism at all. Real communism was an economic system that someone named Karl Marx had come up with, in which everyone owned everything, nobody was rich or poor or more powerful than anyone else, and that was, in fact, kind of the opposite of what the Soviet Union had become. This somewhat blew my mind. Here was the boogeyman that everyone talked about as the great evil threatening us with destruction — and remember, in the world of an American kid who had trouble sleeping at night because she obsessed with how we were one button push away from nuclear war, that meant genuine annihilation —  and it wasn’t even what it really was. How was this possible? How was everything that we saw on TV and in the newspapers and at the movies just plain wrong? It turned out that, once you delved into it, the evolution of the term “communism” in the popular vernacular was an education in how concepts entered the public consciousness and then were propagated endlessly in the echo chamber of the media and society until they became something else entirely, usually in the service of some political or social end. Sound familiar? It wasn’t the same then as it is now that we have the Wild West known as the Internet, in some ways it was easier to get an entire culture to basically think one incorrect thing rather than many insane things, but the ability to miseducate a huge swath a people without their questioning it? Yes, that existed, and understanding that was a very big deal to me. It meant that you always had to look deeper than the surface of things to be sure you understood the reality, even when it came to what those things were called.
Why doesn’t everyone get taught to think this way? Well, like most things in life, it gets increasingly harder to learn as you get older. The more set in our ways we get, the tougher it becomes to look at ourselves critically (which is essential to critical thinking, because to truly get that you must dissect and assess the viability of ideas, you have to start with your own assumptions), much less change the way our brains function in terms of adopting new ways of doing anything that’s really embedded in there, much less ways of doing everything, which is kind what it means to change the way you think. Plus, it’s in the best interest of those in power to keep the bulk of the human race from doing it. It’s tough to build an army of people who don’t automatically follow orders, or have a religion made up of people who are always questioning the word of God, or build a movement if the followers are continually asking the leaders, “Is that really true?” And so we’ve arrived at this situation where we have so much information out there now to make sense out of, and the bulk of us without the tools to figure out how to do that — and many who reject those tools because they’re told education is just liberal elite brainwashing. Instead, you see a lot of people turn to a kind of twisted, easy version of “critical” “thinking” espoused on the fringes of the left and right, which disposes with the thinking part and instead just espouses wholesale rejection of anything dubbed “establishment” or “mainstream,” no matter how awful the alternative may be (and at this point we know: it’s pretty awful). Add to that the folks who skillfully exploit the overwhelm of information and lack of analytical skills to support their own greed, lust for power and desire to win at all cost, and you end up with an awesome new and different kind of embedded orthodoxy, that encourages us to silo ourselves within “our” (really their) belief systems, walled in with “alternative facts” and media that support them, and defending it all tooth and nail with false equivalencies that encourage us not to critique thoughtfully based on evidence, but to to pick apart every idea that doesn’t fit or even makes us uncomfortable (“Well, every politician lies” was one of the most egregious ones I heard used recently to defend the president). 
And, when it comes right down to it, can you blame people? Thinking is exhausting, especially in this environment, and even human beings with the best intentions manage to ruin everything good anyway. Like, even though my parents didn’t make us believe their ideas, of course they still managed to inculcate in us their most mundane opinions. My father was particularly good at doing this, particularly when it came to eating (yup, Jews), like how fast food and chain restaurants should be avoided not based on nutrition but on lack of flavor (which I guess is why we still ate at White Castle), or how chocolate was really the only kind of acceptable dessert. It’s amazing that, no matter how far I’ve come as an adult, I still find it really hard to shake these ideas — like I saw a conversation on Facebook about how pie was superior to cake, and I just thought, Huh? But there aren’t any good chocolate pies. Another case in point: by the time I was a senior, Mr. Snyder had moved up to the high school, and was teaching an AP history class that I had the option to take. I decided to take economics instead, because I had never studied it, because one of my best friends was taking it, and, on some level I’m sure, to show that I didn’t need the wisdom of this idol of my 7th and 8th grade self, now that I was all of 16. I heard from people who took Snyder’s class that in his first opening monologue of the year he mocked those of his former students who had decided not to take his class — which I think might have just been me. That wasn’t really an appropriate thing for a teacher to do, especially since I was kind of doing what he’d taught us: to move on, do my own thinking and evaluate him critically. But as a human being, it’s hard to be a charismatic leader and just let that go — which is why the world has so many despots, and celebrities, and despotic celebrities. On other hand, my economics class was a terrible waste of time because it turned out that I didn’t like economics and the teacher was boring, so perhaps my premature rejection of Mr. Snyder and my 8th grade way of thinking, just to prove that I could do it, hadn’t been the best decision either. It’s hard not to wonder if I’d be just a slightly better, smarter person today if I’d accepted one more opportunity to take his class.
I’ll never know, but I guess the fact that I’m telling you this story means I haven’t given up on critical thinking. Maybe it’s because self-flagellating comes naturally to me, but these days, more than ever, I try to employ those skills as much as I can, even as it grows increasingly fucking hard. On top of all that media landscape stuff I mentioned a few paragraphs back, I also have this stupid menopause business I mentioned in my last blog post, which just amplifies all of the emotion that drives me as a human to err on the side of insanity, as if there weren’t already enough bad news, and bad “news,” out there driving a person in that direction. There are so many bad actors with so many tools that can be used to manipulate our fear and greed and lust into steamrolling our thinking these days, and all we have to fight back are these little broken piles of poop in our heads. And yet, we all do have them, aka brains, and so we have the ability to use them. And as one of those cynical-on-top-but-at-bottom-idealistic folks who believes we all also have the capacity to change, no matter how hard it might seem, until the day we die, I think we all have the ability to learn how to use them better. And yes, that means you, and your friends, and your kids, and even your cousins in Florida maybe, if we all just try a little harder.
I’m not sure what Mr. Snyder would say about me now, as I try to get people to think about stuff with this blog that almost nobody reads, but considering how many years he spent trying to teach adolescents about Platonic ideals, I’d imagine he’d approve. So in honor of him, and any teacher you’ve had who inspired you to think more, and more better, let’s advocate in 2019 not just for “our values,” but for the value of intelligent thought, even if we have to do it one mind at a time.
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andrewuttaro · 3 years
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30 Years on: What is America?
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I am not of the belief patriotism is a disappearing attribute in this country. I think those who say such a thing tend to struggle with the difference between patriotism and nationalism. I digress, I already wrote that article. I’ll let you do your own research on that. To the degree patriotism is in flux at the moment regardless of anyone’s relative love for America I think it’s because we are at something of a national crossroads.
We’re collectively looking critically at our own history again for the first time in a long time. In the aftermath of a global pandemic the craving for normalcy belies an unsettling question about what that normalcy actually is and if its worth going back to: What is America? No really, what is the lived vision of America in 2021 CE? To the extent you read overzealous nuts on social media drooling over the prospect of Civil War or national partition there is in fact some hard soul searching about the what of America that has potential to lead to real political sectarianism.
I’ll check my privilege at the door and say yes: I, as a straight, white male, has never had a lot to lose in any past incarnation of the American identity. Part of the struggle here is a truly inclusive answer to Who is America? I write this under the assumption literally anyone can be American, and we should build systems that reflect that. Nonetheless, we do have to look to the past for fear of repeating it.
What is America? Well it’s a country for one: more than two hundred years old with a congressional democratic republic form of government. It’s had 46 Presidents and counting. It is composed of 50 States for now. America was founded on a couple core principles it defined around “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Anyone who seriously studies American History will tell you the promises of America’s founding documents were not all fulfilled in the beginning. America’s domestic history is defined by Civil Rights movements, reactions against said movements and a Civil War largely about who would receive the full promise of what America is. Indeed Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President who led America through that Civil conflict, spoke of this nation as the “American Experiment” that would not perish from the earth as long as the Union won. The Gettysburg Address Lincoln delivered about this vision of America was delivered on a battlefield where that nation was invaded by what can properly be called a different imagining of what the U.S. should be. Those invaders were former countryman, looking to make a different formulation of the experiment. America is an experiment, a work in progress, a project.
Nation-States as projects is not a new concept. Even before the United States of America’s War of Independence new nation-states were being founded across the world out of the milieu of Enlightenment Philosophy meeting political realities. In many places the nation-state was a more democratic, self-determining incarnation of what kingdoms and empires had been for millennia prior: the collective force of a like-minded ethnic, tribal, or familial group or otherwise aligned interested parties. The innovation of the American experiment, among other things, was perhaps that it was a nation-state for everyone seeking liberty and personal autonomy. Even though the founders envisioned the enfranchisement of a very specific kind of citizen, this American nation-state had potential from the beginning to be something that had never been attempted before.
Fast forward 128 years on from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The U.S. has not only survived its Civil War, but it has also exploded onto the global stage after two world wars catapulted it to an international superpower. Still believing itself to be the project of liberty and self-determination America had stood opposed to a distinctly oppressive superpower in the Soviet Union and won. In the process the American experiment had been exported anywhere the Soviets couldn’t stop it and now the whole world was familiar with its tenets if not copying its institutions. A Cold War that held all of humanity in suspense at the precipice of nuclear annihilation has yielded to a new reality where America found itself the dominant political force in the world unopposed. 1991, thirty years ago now, was a rare inflection point in history where suddenly massive forces of power were upended at once and there was no clear guiding philosophy for the global political order going forward… except the United States of America. What would America be now? The Post-Cold War reality was ours to lose.
Canada, America’s most intimate international partner and closest neighbor, similarly finds itself at a philosophical turning point. The Canadian author and commentator Will Ferguson points to three core guiding themes, however misled they were, for the Canadian project upon its modern founding in 1867: 1. Keep the Americans out, 2. Keep the French in, 3. Somehow make the indigenous disappear. In Canada’s 150-year history these three ideas color its every decision and define its character. All of these founding directives are now either reversed because they were outright morally wrong (See number 3) or have been killed by a thousand cuts. The nation-state to America’s north is also set to reexamine what it’s all about. In that reexamination of national identity there is great opportunity and great danger. As if an international support group, Canada’s stereotypical niceness reaches out to tell us, we’re not alone in this self-discovery process.
The answer to the Post-Cold War world for the American Experiment in 1991 was doubling down on Americana and exporting our cultural and economic mores around the world. Though this process had already begun in earnest after World War Two, now the whole world was its oyster. From aggressive, no-prisoners capitalism to unapologetic, imperial democracy, you can now find few places on the planet that are not familiar with some facet of the United States’ self-perception. America globalized who it was and not everyone liked it. Indeed many Americans began to increasingly look in the mirror this cultural hegemony provided with a critical eye. Then September 11th happened.
After the terrorist attacks on 9/11 the United States cast its enemies in an axis of evil dualism in the War on Terror that provided an endless horizon of conflict for a military apparatus unseen in human history. The polar opposite, the truly evil enemy the Fall of the Soviet Union deprived America of, would now be replaced with a complex networks of dictators and non-state entities who recorded death threats in caves. While America doesn’t exist today like a traditional empire, its reach is unparalleled, and it can strike almost anywhere on earth in a matter of minutes. With no sufficient counterbalance it would seem its military industrial complex doesn’t know what to do with itself. That menacing, widespread inhuman enemy doesn’t actually exist much in the real world if it even did during the many proxy conflicts of the Cold War decades.
Domestically the thirty years of the Post-Cold War American Experiment has seen the two branches of our government that were supposed to be lesser to the legislative, balloon in importance. In a nation where every philosophical difference is magnified into a culture war the ultimate arbiter of those borderline violent disputes is a Court system that is supposed to be an afterthought and a Presidency that has become outright imperial in spite of the founders explicit anti-monarchical sentiments. When Supreme Court justices die or retire it really seems to be on par with a Pope’s death for political partisans stateside. All good and evil in the land of liberty seems to run through a council of black-robed appointees. All 5 Presidents of Post-Cold War America were cast as lightning rods for their bases and chastised by their opposition with every scandal that would stick (to varying degrees of success). The fourth of such Presidents, Donald Trump, openly rejected the idea of America as a pluralistic nation-state with any international responsibility at all to the contrary of the image that defines Post-Cold War America, in favor of a Pre-World War II image of an isolationist, explicitly white Christian nation. Yes, the current identity crisis played out in sharp contrast in the 2016 election cycle. Many Americans consider that election the perfect storm of two intractably terrible major party choices.
Perhaps we need to face the fact we did it to ourselves. We elect no-compromise fighters whenever we vote only to be shocked when Congress turns into a toxic mess that gets nothing done. It’s always easy to criticize a one-term President but the re-evaluation of what the American experiment will be is not limited to those of a more right-wing conservative bent. The left wing in this country increasingly discusses myriad reforms to everything from our election and representation systems to our healthcare and welfare systems. No matter what your future vision of America is you probably agree, perhaps for vastly different reasons than your neighbor, that America is not the somehow uniquely exceptional nation-state it’s insisted it is, not anymore at least. The Post-Cold War era saw the concept of “American Exceptionalism” become a punchline for Americans of both and every political affiliation. For numerous reasons America’s international and domestic vitality has diminished.
The current President, historically more of a traditionally moderate, establishment democrat, has even engaged in this revisionism aggressively seeking to revive Americans faith in their very form of government with stimulus, infrastructure and voting reform in the most evenly split congress in decades. More progressive types of the left-wing beckon in every election cycle now just as the former President refuses to go away, trying to weaponize the grievance of his increasingly right-wing base in the reimagining of the American experiment he set forth as a more authoritarian leader. We have to make an honest, good faith accounting of this effort toward a new definition of ourselves if any shared consensus as a nation will ever be possible again. There is of course great danger in redefining the purpose of a national project.
However America redefines herself going forward, finding these new definitions is not an optional project. With the U.S. shaken down from its international pedestal by trade war, an ascendant China, and a stubbornly plutocratic Russia, even America’s closest allies are reconsidering how they will persist with an unstable American self-image still able to exert its hard power anywhere on earth. As some Americans pursue a more equitable society at home for historical outgroups still struggling with society’s aged mores, those efforts have been met with open racism and a kind of selfish nationalism that has not been seen this ferociously in three generations. Unless a new lasting, inclusive, American self-image is agreed upon we may be at only the beginning of a long period of internal strife and discord. Increasing numbers of ideologs of both left wing and right-wing persuasions fantasize about cutting off whole sections of the nation whom they rarely agree with. American Statehouses are dominated by right-wing majorities more often than not who have actually initiated voter suppression efforts which positions America in a dangerous place for the next close enough national election. This is not to mention the way gerrymandering steals the power of congressional representation from the very people it was supposed to empower. This whole discussion doesn’t even touch on the increasing threat of environmental catastrophe rarely addressed in the halls of power.
The current American Identity Crisis leaves many issues unaddressed as a matter of fact. An opioid epidemic that is erasing broad swaths of the population, a wealth gap unseen since the gilded age, a skyrocketing suicide rate, a gun violence epidemic, natural resource exhaustion unrelated to climate change, police violence, the fourth rebirth of white supremacist organizations, DC and Puerto Rico Statehood, the Student Debt Crisis, an increasingly intractable housing market putting home ownership out of reach for many young Americans, and numerous other problems sit on the backburner without any signs of meaningful progress. On some level it seems we’ve all given up the project of governing for earning the most points in culture wars that now express themselves on as big a scale as a national election and all the way down to dinner tables and date nights.
What is American? How might we be optimistic about such a rapidly changing country on this Independence Day thirty years on from the end of the Cold War? Among people my age it would seem pessimism if not an outright nihilism about these sorts of things is the common response where activism seems to only make minor gains. Among the general population still rebounding from the COVID19 pandemic it would seem a certain empathy fatigue has set in. Where meaningful answers to these big, generational national identity questions are being formulated it is yet to be seen if a new American consensus can be found.
Perhaps our friend Canada would tell us: these days the most patriotic thing you can do is push for your country to do better. Reckoning with the past and present treatment of minorities and atrocities abroad is not optional if we are to have an honest, effective, united future. For now, if nothing else can move us to truly feel proud of our nation, then maybe this independence day we can recognize our internal interdependence on each other, however different we maybe. If anything the most patriotic way we can be this holiday and every day going forward as Americans is honest and patient about who we were, what we are and what we could possibly be if we commit ourselves to progress once again.
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Everything is Politics: The Role of the Essay and the Democratization of Media
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By Eitan Miller and Kathleen Grillo Hilton Als, author of The Best American Essays, opens up a conversation about stories from magazines, journals, and websites. In his introduction he says, “But the essays of the future start with questions, generally political in nature, and if you don’t think so, think again” (Als xxviii). The term “political” is a broad one. While obviously some essays discuss overtly political issues, we believe that Als is describing a greater phenomenon. “Politics” shape a person’s life and the questions they ask. Als writes that essays are “generally political,” but beyond that, all essays have some basis in politics.
Apart from the simple partisanship of left vs. right, politics is the basis for life in any society. The way that society is governed and its freedoms or restrictions create individuals’ identity and shape their being. The political background of a given country shapes the writing an individual can create. In her essay From Silence to Words, Min-Zhan Lu describes her complex relationship with writing, language, and identity given her experiences in communist China and learning English. Lu directly analyzes how the politics of her country shaped her writing and thinking. She uses language, a key factor in anyone’s life, to exemplify the split world she lived in. The politics of the world she grew up in directly affected her everyday life as a child and what she wrote as an adult. This revelation affects all of us, not just those who grew up in communist China. American “democracy” shapes our lives in more ways than we could possibly know and creates the foundation on which our writing stands.
Hilton Als’s essay was possible solely because of the politics surrounding his life. As Als grew, he utilized experiences from his childhood when writing books that started a conversation about societal issues such as gender, race, sexuality, and identity. This essentially made his books contact zones where he brought issues to light in order to educate and inform those unaware of their position within those issues. As Pratt defines it, a contact zone is a “social space[ ] where cultures meet, clash, and grapple” (Pratt 34). The politics of Als’ life, defined as the way his mind was formed by the governmental structures and influences he grew up with, shaped what he wrote. As with Lu, who talked about language, a large part of what she thought about language came from the politics of her country. Als was born into a country that shunned him for his race, his sexuality, and his size. And so, the essays Als wrote focused on these issues. All writers, whether they write academically or personally, touch on subjects that matter to them and that they have encountered at some point in their life. Where they grow up, who they grow up with, and what ideals they grow up with shape what writers want to speak about. Famous essayist Joan Didion is known for her narrative memoir-style essays and novels. She wrote about various topics that impacted her life, as all authors do. Her life, as described in Goodbye to All That, includes moving halfway across the world by herself to becoming one of the top journalists in her field. This is undoubtedly linked to the politics of her society. Although implicitly, Didion wrote about feminism as Lu wrote about language and Als wrote about racism. They grew up in different circumstances, different times and places, and this is reflected in their essays. The politics of their life, whatever they may look like, continued to influence their work well into adulthood.
Like the other authors, Noam Chomsky was greatly influenced by the politics of his life. In a biography, Christian Garland describes Chomsky: “Chomsky continues to be an unapologetic critic of both American foreign policy and its ambitions for geopolitical hegemony and the neoliberal turn of global capitalism, which he identifies in terms of class warfare waged from above against the needs and interests of the great majority” (Garland). However, Chomsky’s primary work is as a linguist. Furthermore, his essay Prospects for Survival describes the limited chance that the human race will survive for an extended period of time. On the surface, this is a scientific and logical argument given the history of other species, but Chomsky describes the role of politics in the imminent destruction of the human race. He writes about nuclear war and climate change, both political issues, as shaping the human experience or eventually lack thereof. His experiences, as shaped by US politics and the political linguistic dominance of the English language, shaped his ideas, prompting his various essays.
Clearly, essays, while diverse in content, all ask questions and are based in politics. But, there are many ways that discussion can be staged. A relatively recent development is the “video essay,” a form where the creator can present an amalgamation of pictures and videos with a narrated analysis that is generally targeted towards a YouTube audience. This medium is particularly effective when discussing visual matters such as TV and movies because the viewer can witness the pertinent content. In the TED Talk below, a YouTuber who goes by the alias of “Nerdwriter” describes how video essays impacted the genre of the modern essay. Watch specifically from 5:05 to 7:26, though the entire talk is fascinating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ald6Lc5TSk8
Evan Puschak (Nerdwriter) touches on the fact that video essays, in addition to being a convenient method of intertwining various types of media, are far more democratic than “traditional” forms of the essay. Platforms like YouTube allow users to reward and share good content, making information and analysis accessible to all people with Internet access. This democratization of the essay in its various forms is an important development, arguably the most important development of the modern essay. Even other forms of digitally shared essays share this democratization, taking power away from a “moderator” and putting it in the hands of the people. Accessibility is key to any successful essay because essays are meant to be read.
In his book The Best American Essays, Als writes, “Of course [the essays will] be made up of many things including questions, images, and gestures” (Als xxviii). The essay itself is hard to define. From the point of view of a high schooler taking AP courses, the essay consists of five straightforward paragraphs. However, the essay has many different forms. Academic essays written by the authors of this piece include How the Korean Wave Is Crashing Over America by Kathleen Grillo to Alternative Oppression: A Look at the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict by Eitan Miller. These works look at a variety of social and political issues such as race and religion through the lens of media, and are very clearly “political.” On the other hand, essays like those styled after the works of Joan Didion and the authors of this piece have a more narrative style. It may appear that these “essays” are contrary to the definition provided by Als. Didion, as well as our essays styled after her, is not outrightly political. However, they both still find a basis in politics. Didion’s works bring in issues of feminism and the effects a particular geographic location has on a person. Issues of equality and how society is constructed are based in the politics behind the author's life. Would Didion’s essays be the same if she grew up in a communist country? The essays we wrote in her style, though independent, both describe the transition from high school to college. For each of us, we find ourselves thriving in college more  than high school. And although not directly stated in either essay, it asks the questions: Why are colleges, especially high tuition institutions, better for individual growth than high school? What is the effect of education on a person’s life? How do money and the government play into the education a person receives?
Clearly, politics shape society, society shapes the self, and the self expresses ideas through writing. Logically, essays have to be based in politics. Authors are raised with implicit biases that come from the people that surround them, including the politics of the world they grow up in. And when authors write, they carry those biases within their writing. Even if they’re not choosing a side overtly, what they choose to write about is a bias in itself. Als used the stereotypes and prejudices he faced growing up in his writing. Lu struggled with a family life and country that was split, and reflected her struggles through language. Didion discussed the challenges she met as a woman moving from home and back. All authors were born into a certain political circumstance. And, while politics is most commonly viewed in direct relation to the government of a country, the power of politics is so broad that it seeps into everything. Even our most basic thoughts are founded with a certain political ideology. Because of this, it is impossible to say that essays are not based in politics. So what is written, no matter who writes it, when they write it, or where they write it, all comes down to politics.
Works Cited
Als, Hilton. The Best American Essays 2018. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.
Brockes, Emma. “Hilton Als: 'I Had This Terrible Need to Confess, and I Still Do It. It's a Bid to Be Loved'.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 2 Feb. 2018,
Chomsky, Noam.  “Prospects for Survival.”  The Massachusetts Review, 2017, pp. 621-634. www.massreview.org/sites/default/files/06_58.4Chomsky.pdf.
Didion, Joan. Slouching towards Bethlehem: Essays. Picador Modern Classics, 2017.
Garland, Christian. “Noam Chomsky.” The Decline of the Democratic Ideal, chomsky.info/2009____-2/.
Grillo, Kathleen. How the Korean Wave Is Crashing Over America, Intro to College Writing WR-101-13, Emerson College, 21 Nov. 2018.
Lu, Min-Zhan. "From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle." 1987. College English 49(4): 437-448.
Miller, Eitan. Alternative Oppression: A Look at the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, Intro to CollegeWriting WR-101-13, Emerson College, 21 Nov. 2018.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 1991. New York: Modern Language Association P, 1991: 33-40.
Puschak, Evan. “How YouTube Changed the Essay.” TEDxTalks, uploaded 9 Jun. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ald6Lc5TSk8.
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