Part One. The Foundation of any Writing Class: Thesis
Qualities of Successful Thesis:
1. One sentence that establishes a demonstrable argument or purpose.
2. Demonstrable means two things: writer has authentic emotional connection to material so he or she doesn’t run out of gas at the midway point. Secondly, it means writer can support the thesis with mapping statements. Sample: The popularity of SUVs reveals a malignancy about American consumerism. First, SUV makers market their vehicles toward people who wish to dominate and bully on the road; second, SUV drivers feel entitled to cheap gas to quench their driving habits, at the expense of American dependency on oil from hostile countries; third, SUV drivers often recklessly multi-task as they live inside their little cockpit fantasy. Lipstick, DVD, Carl’s Jr. gluttony, cell phone, etc. SUV drivers don’t care that their vehicles decapitate car drivers.
3. A good thesis defies the obvious or The So-What Factor: Sample: Tom Cruise and Terrell Owens are jerks. A better thesis: Society requires grotesque celebrities, such as Tom Cruise and Terrell Owens, to be our punching bags. First, these vile celebrities refute the unhealthy notion that riches result in goodness; second, our communal hatred for them gives us a sense of shared values; third, our loathing for these miscreants gives us catharsis and we vent our class envy and middle class frustrations.
4. A good thesis answers a compelling question. Why does no one care about Barry Bonds, even as he closes in on Hank Aaron’s record? In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, how did the US government leave so many people to die in a country that is the richest and freest in the world? Why do women continue to outnumber men in college enrollment? Patience, fortitude, humility, pride, long-term vision. What is it?
Sample Thesis Statements
Taking your date to a restaurant on Valentine’s Day is an exercise in foolishness and futility because _______________________, ____________________________, _____________________________, and ________________________________.
The popularity of American Idol is rooted in our unquenchable appetite for seeing others mocked and humiliated. This appetite stems from our ____________________________, _________________________, _______________________, and ____________________________.
There is a certain type of SUV driver who embodies the most malignant characteristics of American narcissism. These characteristics include ___________________________, __________________________, _____________________________, and ______________________________.
Contrasting thesis: The SUV driver and the Mini Cooper Driver give us a picture of two very different types of Americans, the low-brow troglodyte vs. the high-brow hipster. The trog can be distinguished by his penchant for ________________________, ______________________, and _______________________ while the hipster’s calling card is his _________________________, ____________________________, and _______________________________.
Part Two. “The Chain” 131
One. Spite: The impulse for revenge. More specifically, spite is an obsessive appetite for harming and injuring someone as a form of self-gratification and the misguided pursuit of justice.
Two. Spite: “Bite your nose to spite your face” captures the Faustian Bargain of revenge in which the avenger suffers self-mutilation as he seeks misguided “justice.”
Three. What are Brian Gold’s psychological weaknesses that fuel his spite?
1. Self-pity causes resentment, which seeks relief through lashing out at one’s perceived enemy. Gold pities his low station in life. See page 136.
2. Lacking in self-esteem and self-worth, he needs an enemy to elevate his self-regard and to appear heroic toward others. See page 132 in which Brian Gold is obsessed with boasting of his heroism to others. See page 137 where he fears people perceive him as being weak and passive for being a Jew.
3. He resents that people, including himself, question his masculinity and he seeks revenge to impress people like Tom Rourke so that they will give him “Man Points.” See page 135 in which Tom goads Brian into admitting he liked the taste of blood because, we can infer, real men like blood.
4. He feels alone in his anger, feels that his anger is not understood (certainly Brian Gold’s wife doesn’t understand it) and he seeks those who will help him coddle his anger because in part this newfound anger empowers him. See page 133.
5. The aggrieved oversimplifies a single event and allows that one event to be a repository for all the anger and frustration in his life so that in seeking to avenge one injustice when in reality he has consolidated all his anger from many areas of his life and focused on one thing. This is the case of Brian Gold.
6. He has an injured ego, which seeks to restore itself by dominating its perceived enemy.
7. He has a sense of violated honor, which results in the aggrieved lashing out as misguided attempt at restoring his honor. In an attempt to restore his honor, he resorts to the cheap propaganda of the Taliban, calling the disc jockey a “Child of Satan” to justify his vandalism. See page 144.
8. He possesses self-righteous indignation, which gives the aggrieved an unlimited license to exact justice against his perceived enemy.
9. He is stricken by envy, which causes self-pity and resentment and turns the aggrieved into a “hater” who seeks consolation by degrading and humiliating those he sees enjoy an unfair advantage in life over him. See page 138 where Gold ponders the wealth the owners of the dog enjoy.
10. He has too much alone-time, which allows the aggrieved to dwell and obsess over his perceived grievance, nurturing it and giving it life until it grows beyond his wildest dreams.
Three. What does the story tell us about the unintended consequences of spite?
1. The aggrieved “bites his nose to spite his face,” meaning that in the process of injuring his enemy he suffers an even greater injury.
2. The aggrieved is so intoxicated by his own self-righteous indignation that he is blind to the self-destruction that results from his spite.
3. The aggrieved often forms alliances with unsavory, even satanic individuals like Tom Rourke, who promise to help carry out his acts of revenge. Once the pact is made with the likes of Rourke, Gold now owes a debt to him and here we arrive at the Faustian Bargain. See pages 140 and 142.
4. Once the aggrieved tastes revenge, he develops an addiction to it so that revenge becomes his only form of “pleasure.”
5. Once the aggrieved begins his act of revenge, he sets into motion a chain of events that grow beyond his control resulting in destruction that is disproportionate to the original infraction.
6. Fixation, stagnation; also called arrested development or emotional retardation.
7. Perdition, a form of shame and punishment that lasts a very long, long time. See page 148.
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