Essay Options for Essay 1: Choose one of the following for your 1,500-word essay:
Refute, support, or complicate Asma’s assertion that green guilt is not only a relative to religious guilt but speaks to our drive to sacrifice self-indulgence for the drive of altruistic self-preservation and social reciprocity. See Elizabeth Anderson’s online essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”
Develop a thesis that supports, refutes, or complicates the assertion Debra J. Dickerson, who wrote the “The Great White Way,” would find Michael Eric Dyson's essay "Understanding Black Patriotism" a complement to Dickerson's ideas about race, power, and hierarchy.
Support, refute, or complicate Debra J. Dickerson's argument that race in America is more of a social fantasy than a reflection of objective reality.
Develop a thesis that analyzes the human inclination for staying within the tribe of sameness as explained in David Brooks’ “People Like Us.”
Support, refute, or complicate Nicholas Kristof’s assertion that slashing food stamps is morally indefensible.
Develop a thesis that compares or contrasts (or both) the social pathologies that inform the type of eating disorders and neuroses described in “The Wages of Sin” and “Add Cake, Subtract Self-Esteem.”
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that “Against School” and “Preparing Minds for Markets” persuasively evidence that American education is more about protecting private business interests, maintaining class bias, and asserting mass control than it is about promoting real empowerment such as critical thinking, independence, and freedom.
Develop an analytical thesis that compares the themes of learned helplessness and the vicious downward spiral of poverty as they are evident in “The Consequences: Undoing Sanity” and “How the Poor Are Made to Pay for Their Poverty.”
What Is a Critical Thinker and How Does English 1A Contribute to Becoming One?
9 Components of Critical Thinking
(First 7 components are modified from B.K. Scheffer and M.G. Rubenfeld, authors of Critical Thinking Tactics for Nurses)
One. Analyzing:
You break something into its parts.
Often the parts are the reasons behind something.
The reasons for ongoing inflating real estate prices in Southern California are the following:
shortage of real estate meets ever growing population
historically cheap interest rates
infusion of Chinese wealth as many Chinese look to prime American real estate as the best place they can invest their money
Not only do we use analysis for examining causes, we use analysis to break down something into its distinguishing characteristics.
In college writing classes, you use analysis--breaking things into their parts--for cause and effect and extended definition essays.
Critical Thinking Means Knowing Your Terms Through Extended Definition
Example of Extended Definition:
Mindless consumerism can be broken down into the following distinguishing characteristics:
The mindless consumer embraces “cool” fads and trends because lacking an identity of his own he wishes to glom onto a prefabricated identity provided by consumer culture.
His Apple computer makes him the hipster far superior to his neighbor who owns a PC and is therefore a lowly "peasant."
The mindless consumer believes acquiring material goods will result in popularity and belonging with the desirable clique or “tribe.”
The mindless consumer confuses brand-identity with self-identity.
The mindless consumer uses consumerism as a substitute for real emotional needs such as love, creativity, self-validation, belonging, and wisdom, to name a few.
Because consumer acquisitions are always a failed attempt to meet real emotional needs, the mindless consumer constantly suffers from being in a state of wanting more and more.
In the above example, we broke down the distinguishing characteristics of a mindless consumer.
Two. Applying Standards
You judge according to rules or criteria. You use this type of critical thinking in an argumentative and classification essay.
Examples of Applying Standards
You are a jiu-jitsu master and you must know when a student has elevated to a black belt. If you award a black belt to a student who has failed to meet the criteria and send that student to a black belt tournament, the student will be crushed in the competition. You could be responsible for that student's death.
In a similar example, you are a community college English instructor and you award an A to a freshman student who has failed to meet the criteria for passing the class. That student goes to USC and gets crushed in all his writing classes. The above examples show that we must apply a criteria to our judgments.
In a consumer example, you may be able to afford a Hummer, a vehicle that appeals to you, but it fails to meet the criteria for your needs: Good gas mileage, small enough to park in urban spaces, low service and maintenance costs, etc. A mindless consumer "just buys it" because "it's fun" whereas a critical consumer applies a criteria to his or her purchases.
Three. Discriminating
You recognize differences and similarities resulting in a ranking system.
Examples
You are writing a research paper about the American health care system and through your research you discover that the United States spends twice its GDP on health care as other developed nations; however, the United States is ranked LAST in health care quality. You further discover that in other developed countries no one dies from treatable disease; however, in the United States every year over 25,000 Americans die from treatable disease.
By examining the United States’ health care system in the context of other developed countries, you are in a better position to judge America’s health care system as an abysmal failure.
In your history class, you study Christopher Columbus “discovering” America and you learn that there are different levels of historical narratives.
There is the mythical, propagandistic narrative that paints Columbus as a hero who “discovered” America.
There is the real narrative that paints Columbus for what he really was, a barbaric sociopath who slaughtered, enslaved and tortured indigenous people as he pillaged their country.
In other words, in college you learn there are different ways of interpreting history according to one’s political and philosophical worldview and objective.
Four. Information Seeking
You learn to ask the right questions when presented with a problem.
Example
Why is the United States prison system growing in a time of decreasing crime?
Why has the incarceration rate quadrupled in the last 3 decades during a crime lull?
Then in response to these questions we see that the prison industry makes billions of dollars in annual revenue, has stock options, and employs over 2 million people. There is a business interest, that is to say money interest, in making prisons flourish.
Why do poor people of color get sentenced to prison 10 times greater than whites for the same crimes?
Because it is argued that the prison business system preys on the poor and people historically denied privilege and justice.
We don't start making these inferences until we begin with learning to ask important questions.
Five. Logical Reasoning
You draw inferences or conclusions from evidence.
You call someone that you are romantically attracted to and after 3 calls they still haven’t called you back. You infer that you are OUT and should stop calling unless you want to be perceived as a stalker. Why? Because no reciprocity means no relationship. You are making an intelligent inference.
Every time you go to a family event, you overeat and hate yourself afterward, not because the food was great but because you were bored. You make the following logical inference: You’re an emotional eater.
Every time you have a girlfriend, your college GPA goes down. After five girlfriends and observing a correlation with a sinking GPA and being in a relationship, you conclude that you might be better served waiting until after graduating college to pursue romance. That would be a wise inference.
In a similar example as above, every time you hang out with your non-college-attending buddies, you score low on a college test; every time you don’t hang out with them, you get As on your tests: You infer that it’s time to break those ties. That would be a wise inference.
If you're the same guy who can't be in a relationship AND you can't hang out with your high school buddies, you may infer that your college years may require a certain level of solitude. That, too, my friend, would be a wise inference.
In a college argumentative essay, you have to write about the United States health care system. Through your research you discover that the United States spends twice its GDP on health care as other developed nations; however, the United States is ranked LAST in health care quality.
You infer or conclude that the American health care insurance companies are getting all the money while denying Americans necessary service. Your conclusion would be correct.
Six. Predicting
You take current information and project how this information will shape the future.
Example
It’s been claimed by some sociologists that America is ten years behind Japan in social trends. Today in Japan a large percentage of young people, addicted to virtual realities on the Internet, have lost interest in romance and relationships and are called “herbivores.” Ten years from now we may see a similar phenomenon in America. We already see evidence of this with fewer and fewer young Americans getting married and having children, largely for economic reasons.
Seven. Transferring Knowledge
You apply knowledge from one field to another.
Example
Cesar Milan, known as “The Dog Whisperer,” shows dog owners how to be “calm and assertive” in order to bring calm and discipline to their dogs. You can apply Milan’s methods to childrearing and become a “Child Whisperer.”
Eight. Metacognition (The Third Eye)
You develop the habit of distancing yourself from your heated emotional states and learn to observe and manage your irrational, compulsive, and self-destructive behavior.
Example
A husband and wife are in an escalating argument, and the husband’s Third Eye, his metacognition, rises to the ceiling and looks down at him and his wife, and the husband anticipates that angry words are about to be exchanged, words that can never be erased, words that will leave permanent damage to the relationship, words that actually might kill the relationship. In that moment, the husband clutches his stomach and screams, “Oh my God! My stomach!” He rushes to the bathroom, locks the door, and cools off for 2 hours. He just saved the relationship.
Nine. Putting Things into Historical Context
You have a deeper understanding of current events because you can see those events in the context of history.
Examples
Today many people in the American southern states who defend the Confederate flag and Confederate general statues in front of state buildings argue that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. They say the war was all about "Northern aggression and state rights" when in fact this is an attempt to obscure history with blatant mythology.
Are Civil War reenactments (which tend to glorify Confederacy soldiers) innocent fun giving honor to American history or are they a disgraceful mythologizing of white supremacy?
If you study history, you will learn that the Confederacy was an ideology based on an evil religion called White Supremacy, which aggrandized one race in order to justify cruelty and exploitation of another race.
Seen in this historical context, Confederacy Army glorification achieved through war re-enactments is an abomination.
Critical Thinking Vs. Mindless Consumerism
I had a student who took a scholarship to UNLV and left her boyfriend because by staying local and marrying him she saw a life of mindless consumerism.
Mindless consumers have no critical thinking skills. They don't use analysis, logic, or metacognition. They are portrayed in the following John Verdant essay "The Ables Vs. The Binges."
Becoming a Critical Thinker Is Painful Because It Often Entails a Break from the People in Your Past (those who don't go on the critical thinking journey)
To become a critical thinker often alienates us from people that we grew up with during our "pre-critical thinking days."
When you go to college, there are people in your life who may accuse you of "becoming uppity."
Some students talk about "dying to their old life" the way a guy with kids quits playing poker with his buddies.
The pain of this growing apart from friends and family is expressed in bell hooks' essay "Learning in the Shadow of Class and Race."
“Green Guilt” by Stephen Asma
Two Key Paragraphs:
All this internalized self-loathing is the cost we pay for being civilized. In a very well-organized society that protects the interests of many, we have to refrain daily from our natural instincts. We have to repress our own selfish, aggressive urges all the time, and we are so accustomed to it as adults that we don't always notice it. But if I was in the habit of acting on my impulses, I would regularly kill people in front of me at coffee shops who order elaborate whipped-cream mocha concoctions. In fact, I wouldn't bother to line up in a queue, but would just storm the counter (as I regularly witnessed people doing when I lived in China) and muscle people out of my way. But there is a small wrestling match that happens inside my psyche that keeps me from such natural aggression. And that's just morning coffee—think about how many times you'd like to strangle somebody on public transportation.
When aggression can't go out, then it has to go inward. So we engage in a kind of self-denial, or self-cruelty. Ultimately this self-cruelty is necessary and good for society—I cannot unleash my murderous tendencies on the whipped-cream-mocha-half-decaf latte drinkers. But my aggression doesn't disappear, it just gets beat down by my own discipline. Subsequently, I feel bad about myself, and I'm supposed to. Magnify all those internal daily struggles by a hundred and you begin to see why Nietzsche thought we were always feeling a little guilty. But historically speaking we didn't really understand this complex psychology—it was, and still is, invisible to us. We just felt bad about ourselves, and slowly developed a theology that made sense out of it. God is perfect and pristine and pure, and we are sinful, unworthy maggots who defile the creation by our very presence. According to Nietzsche, we have historically needed an ideal God because we've needed to be cruel to ourselves, we've needed to feel guilty. And we've needed to feel guilty because we have instincts that cannot be discharged externally—we have to bottle them up.
Revised Essay Option:
In a typed essay with a Works Cited page, support, refute, or complicate Asma's assertion that "self-cruelty is necessary and good for society."
One. What kind of outrage does the author’s son express in the first paragraph?
“Don’t you love the earth?” becomes a way of making two statements: One’s allegiance to a cause or a special tribe and self-righteous scolding of someone whose behavior doesn’t conform to the tribe.
These scoldings or admonishments reinforce group cohesion and tribal identity.
Two. What does our need for guilt say about us?
We seem to have some neurosis that makes us feel empty unless we’re on a “guilt trip.”
Guilt seems to be the glue that tells people we’re “fighting on the same team” and if you deviate from the game plan you’re a reprobate, a sinner, an outcast, or even a pariah.
We also love to shame others as we feel elevated, intoxicated, and aggrandized by our self-righteous posturing.
Three. The author writes that behind our guilt is a pervading sense of worthlessness and shame? What is behind these feelings?
He writes that “internalized self-loathing” is a mechanism designed to help us be more civilized. Otherwise we’d live in a Hobbesian nightmare (anarchy).
Self-loathing helps us repress our Id (raw, uncontrollable desire) or our tendencies for self-abandonment and indulgence. By repressing our desires collectively, we protect the interest of the many.
How big of a blanket do I spread out on the beach? How loud do I play my boombox while I'm slopping coconut tanning butter on my tanned torso. How reckless do I fling the Frisbee to my beach buddy, allowing the Frisbee to hit nearby beach visitors? Do I pick up my dog's mess at the dog beach? Do I control my dog's incessant barking? How loud do I laugh at the movie theater? How loud is my eating and slurping while watching the movie?
Self-loathing also represses our aggression.
For example, I loathe myself when I’m driving and I lose my temper. Self-loathing represses my road rage temper tantrums. But that repression requires energy, so that when I’m a “nice and courteous drive” I come home exhausted; after all, for a guy like me being nice requires enormous amounts of energy (repression requires energy after all).
Not eating all the food I want—burgers, pizzas, cakes, pies, etc.—requires even more self-loathing that results in repression and of course the end effect is exhaustion.
“Being me is a full-time job.”
Adding to our neurosis, when we suppress our aggression, as evidenced in the road rage example above, we turn our aggression inward, Asma writes, and this results in “self-cruelty."
Rather than hate the world, we hate ourselves. And this self-hatred serves civilization, that is, until some of us blow up, as we read about all too often in the news.
Four. According to Asma, how did our psychology create a guilt-infused religion?
Asma writes we have always used guilt, repression, and self-loathing as ways to live and cooperate in a civilized society. Rather than psychoanalyze ourselves, we poured out our unconscious guilt and other toxic emotions into religious doctrines that would externalize that guilt and shame by calling us “sinners.” Religion, according to Nietzsche, allows us to be cruel to ourselves.
We can infer from this essay that according to Asma religion is a whip that we use to exact cruelty upon ourselves.
Five. Do guilt and self-loathing exist in secular, urban hipster cultures?
Yes, they do, but they take another form of religion: environmentalism: Asma writes that now “we have the transgressions of leaving the water running, leaving the lights on, failing to recycle, and using plastic grocery bags instead of paper.”
Asma adds, brilliantly I might say, that we have other secular avenues for self-inflicted cruelty and guilt: We punish our indulgent eating habits with crazy diets and cleanses and running on treadmills for hours upon hours until we want to die.
Here's a blog The Emptiness featuring a post titled "Green guilt and slave morality."
Essay Option
Refute, support, or complicate Asma’s assertion that green guilt is not only a relative to religious guilt but speaks to our drive to sacrifice self-indulgence for the drive of altruistic self-preservation and social reciprocity. See Elizabeth Anderson’s online essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”
For essay 1, you need 3 credible sources. One of those sources has to come from the El Camino library database. You can use all 3 if you like. The database provides your MLA Works Cited format. You need to simply copy and paste it on your Works Cited page.
Writing a thesis for the above option:
A thesis is a central argument that can be demonstrated with logic, facts, and research.
If you're a beginning writer, it is often a good idea to give a thesis mapping components, which outline your body paragraphs.
Sample Thesis Against Stephen Asma's Argument
While it's true we must use our conscience to restrain our base impulses so we can get along in a healthy civilization, Asma takes the idea of individual conscience too far, creating a Gospel of Necessary Guilt, which is harmful to human development. For one, excessive guilt disconnects us from ourselves and creates self-medicating, addictive behavior. Second, guilt doesn't accomplish productive goals. Third, guilt is a tool that mainstream society uses to manipulate us and make us conform to their ways.
Sample Thesis That Supports Stephen Asma's Argument
While guilt can be excessive, it is a necessary part of the human conscience. When used correctly, guilt is an effective tool for helping us consider others rather than our own selfish needs, guilt makes us hesitate wisely when we're tempted to fulfill our individual desires over our familial and societal duties, and guilt can be used to pry us out of our self-contented mediocrity.
Summarizing Asma's Major Ideas
Asma’s idea is that people need guilt in order to restrain themselves from attacking others. He claims that without his own residual “self-loathing” he would not hesitate to attack people at Starbucks that annoy him by ordering pretentious sounding drinks. This reveals far more about Asma’s personal psychology than it does about the tendency of people in western cultures to be violent and anti-social. Internally western countries are remarkably peaceful and orderly by global standards.
So why do people cling to these guilt based moral systems? Well, how are people raised? If almost everyone in a culture exhibits a certain trait in common, is it because that trait is “natural”? Is it “natural” to be a Muslim, and that is why everyone in Muslim countries grows up to be a Muslim? Or is it that children in these countries learn very young that they must conform to the beliefs and prejudices of the adults that control society? The same principle is at work in our culture. Even if we think the modern West is secular and progressive, it is still built on a foundation of shared Judeo-Christian slave morality that persists even as the modern man can no longer bring himself to believe in invisible men in the clouds. Environmentalism is just Christianity 2.0.
Slave morality has always been a power strategy for the priestly class. But the old priestly class has been ebbing in power for centuries now, and the field is open for new players to enter the game. Environmentalists, Climate scientists, diet puritans and other lifestyle scolds are all vying to take their place and be the ones to save your soul by selling you indulgences in the form of carbon credits and raw food shakes. As long as our society is built on a foundation of slave morals people will continue to go for it.
According to Asma, what are the key differences between the "religious sins"of the past and the "transgressions" that characterize everyday life today?
And what larger point is he trying to make here about the way our understanding of "sin" has changed?
He seems to be saying that now that we have a psychological understanding of sin, we are less reliant on religion to provide guilt, shame, and repression; however, because we still depend on these forms of self-cruelty to cooperate in a society we create secular religions to do shame's bidding.
Then take a closer look at each of the "transgressions" he lists here. To what extent, in your view, is it valid to feel "guilty" about each?
You're either arguing that guilt is a helpful behavior tool or a slave tool for the "power priests," secular or otherwise.
Or to complicate the matter, you might argue that guilt is both good and bad as a behavior tool.
Is it helpful, necessary, and/or right for these oversights to "plague our conscience"? Why or why not?
"Green Guilt" Essay Option
Refute, support, or complicate Asma’s assertion that green guilt is not only a relative to religious guilt but speaks to our drive to sacrifice self-indulgence for the drive of altruistic self-preservation and social reciprocity. See Elizabeth Anderson’s online essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”
Sample Thesis Statements
"Green Guilt" makes a powerful argument that we must accept the afflictions of guilt and sin, whether that sin be religious or secular, in order that we get along in a cooperative society.
We must conclude after reading Stephen Asma's brilliant "Green Guilt" that human happiness must be compromised in the service of guilt and self-induced "sin" in order that we suppress our selfish drives, cooperate with one another, and hone our conscience in a constantly Darwinian universe.
Stephen Asma's cogent and insightful "Green Guilt" delivers a bombshell to the human race: Absolute happiness is a farce that must take back seat to guilt and misery in order to promote a cooperative society.
Even though it appears Stephen Asma is not religious in any orthodox sense, it is of note that his secular explanation of sin does not conflict at all with my religious sense of it. In fact, my religious sense of sin is compatible with Stephen Asma's secular version when we consider __________, _____________, ____________, and _____________.
"Green Guilt" is just a pathetic excuse for the "slave morality" that allows the power brokers or One Percent to exact control upon the rest of us.
Stephen Asma's attempt to universalize sin as a secular affliction collapses when we consider the affliction he refers to is not universal at all but rather confined to privileged liberals who have created a code of behavior that requires shaming in order to make others conform to their ways.
Writing Effective Introduction Paragraphs for Your Essays
Weak Introductions to Avoid
One. Don’t use overused quotes:
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
“To be or not to be, that is the question.”
Two. Don’t use pretentious, grandiose, overwrought, bloated, self-regarding, clichéd, unintentionally funny openings:
Since the Dawn of Man, people have sought love and happiness . . .
In today’s society, we see more and more people cocooning in their homes . . .
Man has always wondered why happiness and contentment are so elusive like trying to grasp a bar of sudsy, wet soap.
We have now arrived at a Societal Epoch where we no longer truly communicate with one another as we have embarked upon the full-time task of self-aggrandizement through the social media of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.
In this modern world we face a new existential crisis with the advent of newfangled technologies rendering us razzle-dazzled with the overwhelming possibilities of digital splendor on one hand and painfully dislocated and lonely with our noses constantly rubbing our digital screens on the other.
Since Adam and Eve traipsed across the luxuriant Garden of Eden searching for the juicy, succulent Adriatic fig only to find it withered under the attack of mites, ants, and fruit flies, mankind has embarked upon the quest for the perfect pesticide.
Three. Never apologize to the reader:
Sorry for these half-baked chicken scratch thoughts. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and I didn’t have sufficient time to do the necessary research for the topic you assigned me.
I’m hardly an expert on this subject and I don’t know why anyone would take me seriously, but here it goes.
Forgive me but after over-indulging last night at HomeTown Buffet my brain has been rendered in a mindless fog and the ramblings of this essay prove to be rather incoherent.
Four. Don’t throw a thesis cream pie in your reader’s face.
In this essay I am going to prove to you why Americans will never buy those stupid automatic cars that don’t need a driver. The four supports that will support my thesis are ______________, ______________, _______________, and ________________.
It is my purpose in this essay to show you why I'm correct on the subject of the death penalty. My proofs will be _________, _______, _________, and ___________.
Five. Don’t use a dictionary definition (standard procedure for a sixth grade essay but not college in which you should use more sophisticated methods such as extended definition or expert definitions):
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines metacognition as “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking process.”
General Principles of an Effective Introduction Paragraph
It piques your readers’ interest (often called a “hook”).
It is compelling.
It is timely.
It is relevant to the human condition and to your topic.
It transitions to your topic and/or thesis.
The Ten Types of Paragraph Introductions
One. Use a blunt statement of fact or insight that captures your readers’ attention:
It's good for us to have our feelings hurt.
You've never really lived until someone has handed you your __________ on a stick.
Men who are jealous are cheaters.
We would assume that jealous men are obsessed with fidelity, but in fact the most salient feature of the jealous man is that he is more often than not cheating on his partner. His jealousy results from projecting his own infidelities on his partner. He says to himself, “I am a cheater and therefore so is she.” We see this sick mentality in the character Dan from Ha Jin’s “The Beauty.” Trapped in his jealousy, Dan embodies the pathological characteristics of learned helplessness evidenced by ___________, _______________, ________________, and _______________.
John Taylor Gatto opens his essay “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why” as thus:
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in the world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: Their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teacher’s lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
Gatto goes on to argue in his thesis that school trains children to be servants for mediocre (at best) jobs when school should be teaching innovation, individuality, and leadership roles.
Two. Write a definition based on the principles of extended definition (term, class, distinguishing characteristics) or quote an expert in a field of study:
Metacognition is an essential asset to mature people characterized by their ability to value long-term gratification over short-term gratification, their ability to distance themselves from their passions when they’re in a heated emotional state, their ability to stand back and see the forest instead of the trees, and their ability to continuously make assessments of the effectiveness of their major life choices. In the fiction of John Cheever and James Lasdun, we encounter characters that are woefully lacking in metacognition evidenced by _____________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.
According to Alexander Batthanany, member of the Viktor Frankl Institute, logotherapy, which is the search for meaning, “is identified as the primary motivational force in human beings.” Batthanany further explains that logotherapy is “based on three philosophical and psychological concepts: Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.” Embracing the concepts of logotherapy is vastly more effective than conventional, Freud-based psychotherapy when we consider ________________, ______________, __________________, and ________________.
Three. Use an insightful quotation that has not, to your knowledge anyway, been overused:
George Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two great tragedies in life. The first is not getting what we want. The second is getting it.” Shaw’s insight speaks to the tantalizing chimera, that elusive quest we take for the Mythic She-Beast who becomes are life-altering obsession. As the characters in John Cheever and James Lasdun’s fiction show, the human relationship with the chimera is source of paradox. On one hand, having a chimera will kill us. On the other, not having a chimera will kill us. Cheever and Lasdun’s characters twist and torment under the paradoxical forces of their chimeras evidenced by _____________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
Four. Use a startling fact to get your reader’s attention:
There are currently more African-American men in prison than there were slaves at the peak of slavery in the United States. We read this disturbing fact in Michelle Alexander’s magisterial The New Jim Crow, which convincingly argues that America’s prison complex is perpetuating the racism of slavery and Jim Crow in several insidious ways.
Five. Use an anecdote (personal or otherwise) to get your reader’s attention:
When my daughter was one years old and I was changing her diaper, she without warning jammed her thumb into my eye, forcing my eyeball into my brain and almost killing me. After the assault, I suffered migraine headaches for several months and frequently would have to wash milky pus from the injured eye.
One afternoon I was napping under the covers when Lara walked into the room talking on the phone to her friend, Hannah. She didn’t know I was in the room, confusing the mound on the bed with a clump of pillows and blankets. I heard her whisper to Hannah, “I found another small package from eBay. He’s buying watches and not telling me.”
That’s when I thought about getting a post office box.
This could be the opening introduction for an essay topic about “economic infidelity.”
As we read in Stephen King’s essay “Write or Die”:
“Hardly a week after being sprung from detention hall, I was once more invited to step down to the principal’s office. I went with a sinking heart, wondering what new sh** I’d stepped in.”
Six. Use a piece of vivid description or a vivid illustration to get your reader’s attention:
My gym looks like an enchanting fitness dome, an extravaganza of taut, sweaty bodies adorned in fluorescent spandex tights contorting on space-age cardio machines, oil-slicked skin shrouded in a synthetic fog of dry ice colored by the dizzying splash of lavender disco lights. Tribal drum music plays loudly. Bottled water flows freely, as if from some Elysian spring, over burnished flesh. The communal purgation appeals to me. My fellow cardio junkies and I are so self-abandoned, free, and euphoric, liberated in our gym paradise.
But right next to our workout heaven is a gastronomical inferno, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, part of a chain, which is, to my lament, sprouting all over Los Angeles. I despise the buffet, a trough for people of less discriminating tastes who saunter in and out of the restaurant at all hours, entering the doors of the eatery without shame and blind to all the gastrointestinal and health-related horrors that await them. Many of the patrons cannot walk out of their cars to the buffet but have to limp or rely on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory aids, for it seems a high percentage of the customers are afflicted with obesity, diabetes, arthritis, gout, hypothalamic lesions, elephantiasis, varicose veins and fleshy tumors. Struggling and wheezing as they navigate across the vast parking lot that leads to their gluttonous sanctuary, they seem to worship the very source of their disease.
In front of the buffet is a sign of rules and conduct. One of the rules urges people to stand in the buffet line in an orderly fashion and to be patient because there is plenty of food for everyone. Another rule is that children are not to be left unattended and running freely around the buffet area. My favorite rule is that no hands, tongues, or other body parts are allowed to touch the food. Tongs and other utensils are to be used at all times. The rules give you an idea of the kind of people who eat there. These are people I want to avoid.
But as I walk to the gym from my car, which shares a parking lot with the buffet patrons, I cannot avoid the nauseating smell of stale grease oozing from the buffet’s rear dumpster, army green and stained with splotches and a seaweed-like crust of yellow and brown grime.
Often I see cooks and dishwashers, their bodies covered with soot, coming out of the back kitchen door to throw refuse into the dumpster, a smoldering receptacle with hot fumes of bacteria and flies. Hunchbacked and knobby, the poor employees are old, weary men with sallow, rheumy eyes and cuts and bruises all over their bodies. I imagine them being tortured deep within the bowels of the fiery kitchen on some Medieval rack. They emerge into the blinding sunshine like moles, their eyes squinting, with their plastic garbage bags twice the size of their bodies slung over their shoulders, and then I look into their sad eyes—eyes that seem to beg for my help and mercy. And just when I am about to give them words of hope and consolation or urge them to flee for their lives, it seems they disappear back into the restaurant as if beckoned by some invisible tyrant.
The above could transition to the topic of people of a certain weight being required to buy three airline tickets for an entire row of seats.
Seven. Summarize both sides of a debate.
America is torn by the national healthcare debate. One camp says it’s a crime that 25,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year from treatable disease and that modeling a health system from other developed countries is a moral imperative. However, there is another camp that fears that adopting some version of universal healthcare is tantamount to stepping into the direction of socialism.
Eight. State a misperception, fallacy, or error that your essay will refute.
Americans against universal or national healthcare are quick to say that such a system is “socialist,” “communist,” and “un-American,” but a close look at their rhetoric shows that it is high on knee-jerk, mindless paroxysms and short on reality. Contrary to the enemies of national healthcare, providing universal coverage is very American and compatible with the American brand of capitalism.
Nine. Make a general statement about your topic.
From Sherry Turkle’s essay “How Computers Change the Way We Think”:
The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer.
Ten. Pose a question your essay will try to answer:
Why are diet books more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more fat?
Why is psychotherapy becoming more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more crazy?
Why are the people of Qatar the richest people in the world, yet score at the bottom of all Happiness Index metrics?
Why are courses in the Humanities more essential to your well-being that you might think?
What is the difference between thinking and critical thinking?
“Understanding Black Patriotism” by Michael Eric Dyson
One. What is the difference between black patriotism and “lapel-pin nationalism”?
The history of black people is the history of struggle, to fight against slavery, Jim Crow, unfair incarceration laws, unequal income distribution, to name some, and this struggle for a better country through the struggle is far more in-depth and arduous than people spewing easy slogans and clichés.
If one is angry toward one’s country, then one has hope for change. True abandonment of one’s country is not expressed anger or outrage but apathy, and the percentage of people of all colors who stay at home on election days speaks to apathy.
In contrast, there is “My country, right or wrong,” which is a dogmatic credo of the ignorant peasant who subscribes, not to patriotism, but to jingoism, the act of cheerleading or being a fanboy for one’s country without doing the research or hard work concerning the relevant issues.
A jingoist is a Kool-Aid drinker or fanboy who blindly embraces all things that pertain to one’s country.
A true patriot, according to Dyson, is a critical thinker who wants an accurate diagnosis of America's ills in order to make a better America.
Two. What examples does Dyson provide regarding hypocrisy of patriotism?
Dyson points at the five deferments of Dick Cheney, hawkish on terrorism, who may have been hawkish when he was calling the shots, but when it came to him fighting he stayed home from the war five times. He really used those deferments but was eager to make others fight his war.
In contrast, African American critic of American racism Jeremiah Wright surrendered his student deferment and volunteered to join the Marines.
Sample Thesis
Pro Dyson Thesis
Those who attempt to dismiss the criticisms of great African American thinkers as being anti-American are engaging in the most vile form of tribalism and jingoism, and they would be well served to embrace these African American thinkers’ authentic patriotism, which is evidenced by __________, ___________, ___________, and ____________.
Pro Dyson Thesis
Attempts to label the great African American thinkers who have criticized US policy as anti-American collapse when we consider that these thinkers are the truest kind of patriot. This is evidenced by _____________, _______________, ________________, and ____________________.
Against Dyson Thesis
While I concede to Dyson’s point that we can criticize US policy and still be patriotic, Dyson’s examples are too extreme evidenced by _________________, _________________, ________________, and _______________________.
In the following video, we see Michael Eric Dyson make his point about true patriotism as he contrasts it with false patriotism:
False patriots apologize for abusers of civil rights.
False patriots white-wash the real narratives that define racism in America.
False patriots get defensive when truthful criticisms are put on the table.
False patriots romanticize America's ugly past, "the good old days," which were actually a toxic environment populated by racist zombies drunk on the poison Kool-Aid of White Supremacy.
“The Great White Way” by Debra J. Dickerson
One. In the first paragraph, Dickerson writes that the president will struggle to explain what race is to space aliens. She suggests that no one knows what race is, yet it is the “central drama” of America.
Why is race, which is such a vague and confusing term, our nation’s obsession?
Because people of color have traditionally been excluded from the American Dream and there is a history of genocide, slavery, and Jim Crow (segregation and racism), human rights violations that were rooted in the idea of race.
Genocide, slavery, and Jim Crow were justified by white people who, intoxicated by the doctrine of White Supremacy, felt entitled to treat others in the horrid manner of racism and all its resulting evils.
In our contemporary society, we enslave migrant workers in tents up and down the agricultural worksites of California and elsewhere.
In the United States, we imprison black and brown men for the same crimes as whites at a ratio of 10:1.
So race, even in its vague definition, is still a hot-button issue and points to a crisis of injustice and moral bankruptcy.
Two. What does Dickerson mean when she writes that “race is an arbitrary system for establishing hierarchy and privilege”?
The creators of White Supremacy, who escaped the tyranny of European kings knew the value of freedom. But they loved money more than freedom and they only valued freedom for themselves, not others.
White profiteering sociopaths who were envious of the profits slave traders were making in Britain, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere, wanted a piece of the action, but they knew the white Christian peasants and farmers were too religious and too caught up in the command "Love thy neighbor as thyself" to embrace slavery, so the white sociopath conmen insidiously put White Supremacy, the belief that God and Jesus are white and that the world was made for white people, into the white peasants' Bibles and soon enough the peasants and farmers drank enough of this White Supremacy or "evil Kool-Aid," as I'm fond of calling it, and they were on board with the white conmen.
Here's an important point: The white conmen were too clever to be fooled by race. They knew that race doesn't exist, that race is a canard and they used race as a canard to fool the white peasants.
The white peasants actually believed in the Kool-Aid the conmen gave them.
I don't know if there's a Hell, but if there is one with descending levels of torment, it would seem the conmen who knew race was a canard all along would go in the deepest part of Hell.
The peasants would still go to Hell because there's no excuse for their "complicit ignorance," as I like to call it, but they're not as diabolical as the white sociopaths who invented White Supremacy for their own profit.
Review of White Supremacy
White Supremacy is an evil religion, a hybrid of Christianity and white superiority narratives, which states whites were put on Earth lord over everyone else in any manner they saw fit.
The Inventors of White Supremacy Didn't Believe in It Themselves But Created It to get poor Christian farmers to "get on board" with slavery.
The creators of White Supremacy didn’t even believe in it. They were cynics who created a false religion because they knew the masses of white people would “drink the Kool-Aid” and become converts to White Supremacy as slavery became a powerful economic engine that made America into a super power.
In the United States, there was no such thing as "race" until slavery came along.
Before the false religion of White Supremacy, people did not have a consciousness of race or skin color. Race and skin color were inventions, or if you will, an elaborate fiction or fairy tale designed to justify genocide, slavery, and Jim Crow.
White farmers and slave owners drank the Kool-Aid and saw themselves as “good Christians” even as they exacted cruelty upon people of color. They were able to use White Supremacy (“I’m just doing what the good Lord ordained me to do.”) to assuage their conscience and perform heinous acts, which constituted the most depraved human rights violations.
Three. What attitudes did white Americans feel toward European immigrants from Ireland to Greece?
They were looked upon as subhumans that would takeover America as “mongrel hordes” unless the white Americans started breeding more.
There was a racial hierarchy with Anglo Europeans at the top, Italians, Slavs, Greeks, and Irish at the middle, and brown and black people relegated to the bottom.
Hostility was so bad against non-Anglo Europeans that 11 Italians were lynched in Louisiana in 1891.
The Anglo whites wanted to assimilate the southern Europeans into more jobs and get their votes, so they “promoted Southern Europeans to whiteness,” whiteness being equivalent to the gold card of freedom, respect, and privilege.
This privilege gave “fascist-leaning Italians” full respect while patriotic Japanese were put into internment camps.
One of the horrid things about southern Italians becoming full white Americans was in sharing white Americans’ hate and disdain for people of color. For example, we read that Italian Americans took delight in beating up black people.
This was their sick rite of passage into “being fully white.”
Four. How was FDR’s New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal a sort of affirmative action for whites only?
The states could decide who got the New Deal money and it always went to poor whites, never to blacks. White liberals in the north allowed southern states to do with the New Deal as they liked, state by state. There was no federal enforcement so that all people benefited.
During the Depression, relief only went to poor whites. Poor blacks received nothing.
Blacks were not eligible for Social Security until the 1950s.
These injustices, which happened 70 years ago, give weight to the argument for affirmative action, Dickerson argues.
We did have affirmative action for the poor, Dickerson reminds us, but 70 years ago, it was only the white poor who received it.
Essay Options
Develop a thesis that supports, refutes, or complicates the assertion Debra J. Dickerson, who wrote the “The Great White Way,” would find Michael Eric Dyson's essay "Understanding Black Patriotism" a complement to Dickerson's ideas about race, power, and hierarchy.
Support, refute, or complicate Debra J. Dickerson's argument that race in America is more of a social fantasy than a reflection of objective reality.
Sample Thesis
"The Great White Way" makes the persuasive case that race is a canard and a social construction that has nothing to do with scientific reality and everything to do with privilege evidenced by __________, ____________, ______________, and ________________.
Sample Thesis
"The Great White Way" and the Rachel Dolezal controversy both reinforce the idea that race is an arbitrary social construction, an insane fantasy, and an anti-humanitarian fiction designed to give a false order of things, to provide a rationale for exploitation, and to reinforce our base tendencies for tribalism.
Related Readings
"There Is No Such Thing As Race"
"Race Is a Social Concept, Not a Scientific One"
Citing Electronic Sources Included YouTube
Topic of Race: Rachel Dolezal
"I am black, and Rachel Dolezal is not" by Rebecca Carroll, Dame
"Black Like Who? Rachel Dolezal's Harmful Masquerade"
"Rachel Dolezal's Unintended Gift to America"
Defining race has been in the national news since fraud Rachel Dolezal has been exposed for the mountebank and pathological narcissist that she is.
McMahon Grammar Exercise: Essential and Nonessential Clauses
Circle the relative clause and indicate if it’s essential with a capital E or nonessential with a capital N. Then use commas where necessary.
One. I’m looking for a sugar substitute that doesn’t have dangerous side effects.
Two. Sugar substitutes which often contain additives can wreak havoc on the digestive and nervous system.
Three. The man who trains in the gym every day for five hours is setting himself up for a serious muscle injury.
Four. Cars that operate on small turbo engines don’t last as long as non-turbo automobiles.
Five. Tuna which contains high amounts of mercury should only be eaten once or twice a week.
Six. The store manager who took your order has been arrested for fraud.
Seven. The store manager Ron Cousins who is now seventy-five years old is contemplating retirement.
Eight. Magnus Mills’ Restraint of Beasts which is my favorite novel was runner up for the Booker Prize.
Nine. Parenthood which is a sort of priesthood for which there is no pay or appreciation raises stress and cortisol levels.
Ten. I need to find a college that specializes in my actuarial math major.
Eleven. UCLA which has a strong actuarial math program is my first choice.
Twelve. My first choice of car is the Lexus which was awarded top overall quality honors from Consumer Reports.
Thirteen. Mangoes which sometimes cause a rash on my lips and chin area are my favorite fruit.
Fourteen. A strange man whom I’ve never known came up to me and offered to give me his brand new Mercedes.
Fifteen. My girlfriend who was showing off her brand new red dress arrived two hours late to the birthday party.
Sixteen. Students who meticulously follow the MLA format rules have a greater chance at success.
Seventeen. The student who tormented himself with the thesis lesson for six hours found himself more confused than before he started.
Eighteen. There are several distinctions between an analytical and argumentative thesis which we need to familiarize ourselves with before we embark on the essay assignment.
Nineteen. The peach that has a worm burrowing through its rotted skin should probably be tossed in the garbage.
Twenty. Peaches, which I love to eat by the bucketful are on sale at the farmer’s market.
Twenty-one. Baseball which used to be America’s pastime is declining in popularity.
Subordination and Coordination (Complex and Compound Sentences)
Complex Sentence
A complex sentence has two clauses. One clause is dependent or subordinate; the other clause is independent, that is to say, the independent clause is the complete sentence.
Examples:
While I was tanning in Hermosa Beach, I noticed the clouds were playing hide and seek.
Because I have a tendency to eat entire pizzas, inhaling them within seconds, I must avoid that fattening food.
Whenever I’m driving my car and I see people texting while driving, I stop my car on the side of the road.
I have to workout every day because I am addicted to exercise-induced dopamine.
I feel overcome with a combination of romantic melancholy and giddy excitement whenever there is a thunderstorm.
We use subordination to show cause and effect. To create subordinate clauses, we must use a subordinate conjunction:
The essential ingredient in a complex sentence is the subordinate conjunction:
|
after |
once |
until |
I workout too much. I have tenderness in my elbow.
Because I workout too much, I suffer tenderness in my elbow.
My elbow hurts. I’m working out.
Even though my elbow hurts, I’m working out.
We use coordination to show equal rank of ideas. To combine sentences with coordination we use FANBOYS (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so)
The calculus class has been cancelled. We will have to do something else.
The calculus class has been cancelled, so we will have to do something else.
I want more pecan pie. They only have apple pie.
I want more pecan pie, but they only have apple pie.
Using FANBOYS creates compound sentences
Angelo loves to buy a new radio every week, but his wife doesn’t like it.
You have high cholesterol, so you have to take statins.
I am tempted to eat all the rocky road ice cream, yet I will force myself to nibble on carrots and celery.
I want to go to the Middle Eastern restaurant today, and I want to see a movie afterwards.
I really like the comfort of elastic-waist pants, but wearing them makes me feel like an old man.
Both subordination and coordination combine sentences into smoother, clearer sentences.
The following four sentences are made smoother and clearer with the help of subordination:
McMahon felt gluttonous. He inhaled five pizzas. He felt his waist press against his denim waistband in a cruel, unforgiving fashion. He felt an acute ache in his stomach.
Because McMahon felt gluttonous, he inhaled five pizzas upon which he felt his waist press against his denim waistband resulting in an acute stomachache.
Another Example
Joe ate too much heavily salted popcorn. The saltiness made him thirsty. He consumed several gallons of water before bedtime. He was up going to the bathroom all night. He got a bad night’s sleep. He performed terribly during his job interview.
Due to his foolish consumption of salted popcorn, Joe was so thirsty he drank several gallons of water before bedtime, which caused him to go to the bathroom all night, interfering with his night’s sleep and causing him to do terribly on his job interview.
Another Example
Bob dropped his peanut butter sandwich in the tiger’s enclosure. He leaned over the fence to reach for his sandwich. He fell over the fence. A tiger approached Bob. The zookeeper ran between the stupid zoo customer and the wild beast. The zookeeper tore his rotator cuff.
After Bob dropped his peanut butter sandwich in the tiger’s enclosure, he leaned over the fence to recover his sandwich and fell into the enclosure during which time he was approached by a hungry tiger, forcing the nearby zookeeper to run between Bob and wild beast. During the struggle, the zookeeper tore his rotator cuff.
Don’t Do Subordination Overkill
After Bob dropped his peanut butter sandwich in the tiger’s enclosure, he leaned over the fence to recover his sandwich and fell into the enclosure during which time he was approached by a hungry tiger forcing the nearby zookeeper to run between Bob and the wild beast in such a manner that the zookeeper tore his rotator cuff, which resulted in a prolonged disability leave and the loss of his job, a crisis that compelled the zookeeper to file a lawsuit against Bob for financial damages.
Grammar: Dangling Modifiers
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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