Review:
So far we’ve talked about Jeff Henderson’s Redemption Journey in terms of his Fall, which includes concupiscence, pursuing the good without a moral compass, and denial, the refusal to take accountability for one’s actions by relying on all sorts of rationalizations.
Redemption Reviewed
1. The Fall, misguided quest for goodness often resulting in the following:
concupiscence
we make rationalizations to justify our actions. We eventually believe our rationalizations and this is a form of insanity
denial or willed ignorance; we pretend that we don't know what we're doing.
moral dissolution, numbness
2. Denial of the Fall because of the some of the above reasons
3. Epiphany or revelation in which we realize our accountability for our Fall
4. Contrition: feeling badly for our misdeeds; this is part of perdition, suffering for our misdeeds.
5. reinvention: starting from zero (also part of our perdition) and building fortitude and hard work to create a new self. Reinvention is comprised of the following:
humility, starting at zero
fortitude
perserverence in the face of failure
discerning fruitful failure from futile failure
10,000 Hour Rule
6. Flourishing, blossoming at craft and personal life together
7. giving back, mentoring, other acts of atonement
Today we will look at the second part of the Redemption Journey: Perdition, which means suffering punishment for one’s crimes or misdeeds.
Reality sets in: crime and punishment or perdition
1. Jeff Henderson gets arrested and realizes he won’t have access to women the way he used to. This is a shock to his psyche.
2. He suffers another shock to his psyche. Once a powerful man who called the shots, he finds in prison that he is now powerless, beholden to guards like Big Bubba on page 79.
3. In prison he has time to think about his life in ways he didn't before. For example, he wanted to be like T whom he worshipped as a sort of god. Ironically, he doesn’t realize until he’s in prison that he had become BIGGER that T and that being SO BIG put him on the feds’ radar screen and that was his downfall. 81
4. All Jeff’s life he’s been inculcated with the belief in the Homie or Gang Banger Code of Silence as if it were religious truth. But in prison he discovers the No-Snitch Code has no real value because a homie will rat you out when it’s to his advantage. See page 151.
5. Jeff thought he was invincible but discovers a painful fact: The Feds had been watching him, not for several months, but for several years. He was digging his own grave for a long, long time. 87
6. Why me? Jeff is not a victim but he cries to Jesus and feels sorry for himself. In a state of perdition, he his helpless, beholden to the caprices of prison life.
7. He realizes a painful fact: Prison may have saved his life. One of the Twins, his supplier, got killed shortly after Jeff’s imprisonment. 89
8. Too late in the game, he discovers another painful fact: Anyone can get convicted who doesn’t get caught with drugs or money. 94
9. His perdition takes on palpable pain when he is given legal accountability for his crimes: 19.5 years. See page 100.
10. Only after he’s arrested does he discover another painful fact: There is no loyalty in the streets. It’s a myth. See page 152 after his homies steal all his stuff after he’s arrested.
What is Jeff’s attitude at the beginning of his prison sentence? Contrast with his attitude at the end of it (centripetal vs. centrifugal development)
1. Self-pity, victimization
2. Nihilism 110
3. Getting over, coast in life, do the minimum.
4. Universe of One 113. On page 192, he says “in prison everything is about you.”
5. No passion for marriage 114
6. He fluctuates between complacency and despair.
Future Goal and Redemption
We all have the drive for redemption; if this drive is frustrated, the drive does not remain dormant and neutral inside of us; to the contrary, this drive goes inward and poisons us.
Changing Our Definition of Success
When Jeff is able to redirect his energy from being a drug dealer to a chef, he finds redemption. All of us have a “life energy” that can be directed toward concupiscence, revenge, victimization or growth, maturity, and independence as is explained by Erich Fromm in this passage from Escape from Freedom:
It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities. Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed toward life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed toward destruction. In other words: the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness.
Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies--either against others or against oneself--are nourished.
In other words, Fromm is saying that we must flourish in a passion in order to direct our energy toward growth rather than re-direct that energy toward self-destruction such as concupiscent pursuits.
It’s only in prison that Jeff is forced to being the journey to redemption.
Redemption and Flourishing
Flourishing is the opposite of concupiscence flourishing, from the Greek word eudaimonia: means to blossom, to become who we were meant to be.
When Jeff Henderson becomes an illegal “business man” being followed by the feds, rationalizing his illegal activities, and living on easy money, he’s not the person he was meant to be. He is rather a grotesque variation. We see his misshapen character in prison when he becomes the enraged, nihilistic, disaffected victim.
Only when he learns a passion and accepts his responsibilities as an adult, does he begin to flourish and he becomes happier than he was as a concupiscent drug dealer.
Taking a Close Look at Fortitude: The strength and tenacity to push forward in the presence of ever surmounting obstacles. What are Jeff Henderson’s obstacles to starting over?
1. Jeff Henderson discovers that the world is full of “haters and dream crushers” (crabs in a bucket). These are the haters who don’t want people with good intentions to be afforded a clean, fresh start because they want everyone to share in their failure and misery.
2. Others don’t trust us. Nor do they forgive us for our past deeds.
3. Often we have an inability to forgive ourselves for our past deeds creates baggage
4. Often we lack of confidence: We fear that we may backslide into our old ways
5. Often a past label like “convicted felon” creates a stigma that is extremely difficult to erase. We see the felon. We don’t see the husband trying to support his wife and two kids.
6. Jeff Henderson has to tone down his “stroll” and his muscles with baggy clothes to remove the hard gangsta look. See page 2
7. Jeff Henderson has to remain gracious and poised when he gets pooh-poohed by Caesar’s Palace, the very place that was happy to take his money when he was a dealer “back in the day.” Now Caesar’s is playing all high and mighty.
Centrifugal Motion or JH's Transformation
1. He sees he’s been blind and willfully ignorant about the consequences of his selling drugs. 115
2. He develops intellectual curiosity, reading eclectic material, various intellectual and religious doctrines. He doesn’t embrace one but rather picks and chooses as he sees fit. 124
3. He becomes engaged with others vs. being disaffected. 124
4. He finds a passion, cooking, that utilizes his talents.
5. He learns the humility of starting at the bottom and not getting things “easy” like when he was a dealer.
6. He learns a hard work ethic. It’s almost impossible to acclimate from easy money to hard work with low pay. But Jeff was always a hard worker.
7. Jeff found a mentor in Big Roy and later in Las Vegas a cook named Friendly. And then Robert at the Gadsby’s.
8. Jeff experiences contrition and regret on page 146: He is among the dregs of the world, exactly where he belongs, in the lowest rung of society: hell.
9. You must have a vision of a different life. See page 147.
10. He begins to take pride in his work. 147: Speed, taste, and presentation. 188
11. He undoes his wrong by talking to teens in Vegas. 165
Your Research Paper
1. Use the 80-20 rule: 80% of the essay should be written in your words; 20 % should be quoted, paraphrased, or summarized material that refers to your research sources. You need a minimum of 3 sources.
2. Use MLA format: 12 font, Times New Roman, headers, Works Cited . . .
3. Use correct MLA Works Cited and refer to your book or my website for updated format.
Thesis Statements That Are Too General Because They Have No Mapping Components
Cooked is about the rising/falling motif discussed in McMahon's class.
Cooked shows us that when we think we're rising we're falling and when we think we're falling we're rising.
Better Thesis with Mapping Components
Cooked embodies the rising/falling motif discussed in McMahon's class evidenced by ______________, ____________, ___________, _______________, and _______________.
"Rhapsody in Realism" by David Brooks explains our rising/falling motif.
Rewrite the following sentences to correct the dangling modifiers:
1. Larded with greasy fries, the waiter served me a burnt steak.
2. Mr. McMahon returned her essay with a wide grin.
3. To finish by the 4 P.M. deadline, the computer keyboard blazed with the student's fast typing fingers.
4. Chocolate frosted with caramel sauce, John devoured the cupcakes.
5. Tapping the desk with his fingers, the school clock's hands moved too slowly before recess.
6. Showering the onion rings with garlic salt, his sodium count spiked.
7. The girl walked her poodle in high heels.
8. Struggling with the tight jeans, the fabric ripped and made an embarrassing sound.
9. Turning off the bedroom lights, the long, hard day finally came to an end.
10. Piled high above the wash machine, I decided I had better do a load of laundry.
11. Standing on the hotel balcony, the ocean view was stunning.
12. Running across the floor, the rug slipped and I collapsed.
13. Writing anxiously, the essay looked littered with errors.
14. Mortified by my loss to my opponents, my baseball uniform sagged.
15. Hungry after a day of football, the stack of peanut butter sandwiches on the table quickly disappeared.
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