Homework Check:
Write a 3-paragraph, 350-word essay that gives 3 reasons Henderson’s post-prison struggles were more difficult that his stay in prison. Use at least 3 signals phrases to cite the memoir.
Homework for 2-28: Get into teams and prepare to make photocopies of first typed draft for peer edit day.
One. You Can't Rise If You Don't Fall First:
Part of Redemption Is the Journey to the Dark Side or the Fall.
A common part of this darkness is a form of insanity called concupiscence. We all have a greedy pig inside us that is tough to control. It's like playing Whack-A-Mole. We kill the pig in one area of our lives, but it raises its stinky fat face in another area.
Defining Concupiscence or Avarice or Rapacity
We can define concupiscence as limitless, selfish desires that don't sate our appetites. To the contrary, the process of feeding our concupiscence only serves to make our desires greater than before. The result of concupiscence is insanity. For a recent example, we can look at Tiger Woods who is an example of concupiscence, which is the sum of temptation plus opportunity.
Some of us don't go completely insane in our quest to feed our desires. We mature, grow up, and join the adult world. Part of being an adult is knowing our limits in eating, spending, pleasure-seeking, etc.
In other words, being an adult is about conquering concupiscence.
Ache
When we mature and realize we must assert limits on ourselves, we often have an awakening to Existential Ache, the realization of two things:
One, we are not, as we once believed in childhood, the center of the universe.
Two, we come to realize that our desires will ALWAYS outstrip our capacity to satisfy them.
Failure to realize the latter principle of Existential Ache results in concupiscence, the futile struggle to appease our ever-growing appetites.
Concupiscence is stimulated by opportunity and imagination. We have the money to sate our appetites and we imagine the satisfaction of increasing our appetites while finding the necessary resources to satisfy those freshly honed desires.
The purpose of philosophy, religion, and the Humanities in education is learning how to manage Ache by learning self-mastery: learning how to let one's cortex (powers of reason) conquer the reptilian, self-destructive brain.
Most people don't even have the language to conceptualize the above.
Example of concupiscence: Miami (people go crazy there)
A businessman travels frequently to Miami where he frequents a swanky club. The club's outer rim terrace is cluttered with women of the most exquisite beauty and pulchritude. But inside, it is rumored, in the VIP suite, the women are even more beautiful than the one's visible on the outside plaza. So the businessman pays the handsome fee to become a VIP and comforts himself with the thought that he, as an exclusive club member, has access to Miami's most lovely women.
Wrong. Rumors abound that there is an inner chamber, requiring a surreptitious descent down a trap door, where the women are even more outrageously beautiful than in the VIP room. Our troubled businessman pays the bouncer $500 and is escorted through the trapdoor where, once again, he is comforted with the belief that he has access to Miami's most beautiful women.
Wrong. Rumors abound about another trapdoor leading to a chamber of even more rarified beauties and another and another until the businessman collapses with the despair that Miami's most beautiful women will elude him forever. He shrinks with anguish, forgoes all interests and passions, and spends the rest of his life languishing in self-pity.
This is the story of concupiscence.
And it is the story of Jeff Henderson before he "falls" in prison where his opportunities to fuel his concupiscence have all but ended.
One. Concupiscence and Its Causes
1. Concupiscence is the search for happiness based on gratifying pleasure and ego without a moral compass. The result is moral dissolution, a fancy term for the loss of morality and sanity. Tennessee Williams became famous after writing the play A Streetcar Named Desire and lived in a fancy hotel where he had room service and escorts visit him every day. One evening he poured gravy over his banana split and realized he had become insane. He left the hotel, went to Mexico and resumed with his writing career.
2. Concupiscence is the pursuit of happiness without a moral compass; in other words, you have no vision of anything beyond gratifying your base appetites and therefore have a misguided definition of happiness.
3. When you have no vision beyond your base appetites, you are what we call “Bread and Circus,” which means all you desire is food and entertainment.
4. Concupiscence compels you to feed your irrational appetites, which wage war against your powers of reason. For example, one of my students knows a guy who lives in expensive Brentwood and drives a BMW but he has to eat his sister’s government cheese and other handouts because he has no money for food. That’s not a reasonable situation.
5. Concupiscence grows inside us when we have role models without a moral compass. In Jeff Henderson’s case, he sees all the major “players,” like T-Row, glory in the life of concupiscence, the unbridled fulfillment of their desires. I know rich men who buy $50,000 watches, and they're still miserable with this restless need to go on the hunt for another luxury watch. They're trying to fill an eternal emptiness that nags at them.
6. Concupiscence grows inside us from the anger that is born from having a sense of deprivation: “I’m gonna get mine.”
7. The writer Jonathan Franzen gives concupiscence another name, Ache: Being overwhelmed by desires that always outrun our capacity to fulfill them.
8. Another cause behind concupiscence is vanity, also called the libido ostentandi: The need to show off. A rich woman in Argentina, a landlady, wears a body length mink coat at an outdoor bazaar where the temperature is 105 degrees. She wants everyone to know she is of a higher stature. She passes out and dies of heat stroke.
Another example: A student wrote an essay about his friend who, buying a BMW 5 series, had to work 2 jobs and drop out of El Camino College. The misguided young man’s didn’t know how depressed he was when he realized all his friends, the people who would be impressed with his BMW, could not see it since they were attending college. One day this BMW owner made a special trip to the college and yelled to his buddies to come look at his car but they had to go to his class and my student’s final vision of his friend was screaming from his BMW on the Crenshaw parking lot for someone to check out his car. No one cared.
9. As I said before, concupiscence is the result of temptation plus opportunity. Jeff Henderson had both.
Two. Concupiscence and Its Effects: Moral Dissolution
1. If concupiscence goes its full course, we arrive at a condition of moral dissolution like Tennessee Williams mentioned above. Here’s another example: A man cheats on his girlfriend or wife once and feels the searing pain from his conscience. He cheats on her 1,000 times and feels nothing because his conscience has decomposed into what we call moral dissolution. In other words, he’s lost his soul.
2. Another word for moral dissolution is debauchery, which means the moral pillars that hold up your morality have fallen and your morality has fallen with them.
3. Ennui; you’ve filled your senses with so much pleasure that you can no longer feel anything. You have become incurably numb to life and now must suffer the desperation of needing to feel anything, no matter what the cost. This process is also called the “hedonic treadmill” in which you constantly have to spike the pleasure quotient before you adapt to the pleasure, become numb to it and have to spike the pleasure again. This cycle goes on and on with you always losing.
4. Nihilism; the death of meaning. There is no right or wrong. Life has no meaning. The world is merely a playground for your desires. The world is a giant margarita glass and you suck on the straw, slurp every last drop and then die. Hedonism always ends in nihilism.
Three. In addition to concupiscence, Jeff Henderson becomes a victim of his own success. One of the memoir’s major themes is that misguided success can be a great misfortune leading to insanity.
1. One of the major themes in Cooked is that in life when we think we’re rising, we’re actually falling. Henderson's redemption is not born from his rise to wealth but during his fall in prison.
2. The problem with success is that most of us have a misguided definition of it. If success is based on concupiscence, then the “success” we achieve will drive us insane.
3. Another problem with success is that it creates the illusion of invincibility. The more successful Henderson’s drug operation becomes, for example, the more safe he feels. He believes he is “untouchable.”
4. When we feel invincible we go into denial. For example, Henderson minimizes, to his detriment, his drug dealer associations, some of whom will be kidnapped and killed. He also underestimates the stupidity and back-stabbing nature of another one, which will result in his demise. Finally, Henderson is in denial about the feds’ suspicions regarding Henderson’s covert drug operations. The feds arrest him without even catching Henderson with any drugs at all because they have a long list of records, phone conversations, ancillary transactions, witness testimony, etc.
5. Another form of denial is moral denial. Henderson rationalizes that he is a drug dealer but he does so “strictly as a businessman.” He’s not about violence, taking drugs, or hanging out with gang bangers. But the fact of the matter is his operations are harmful, a painful fact he doesn’t realize until he’s in prison.
6. When our success generates easy money, we go insane because suddenly we lose our sense of value and hard work and our sense of goals. We live in Another Universe, one that most people don’t live in. The films City of God and Goodfellas illustrate this point.
7. When money is easy for us and we see the rest of the world “getting punked,” being forced to do real work to make their money, we start to feel so superior to the rest of humanity that we think we’re gods. We think this to our own detriment.
Review of when we think we're rising we're really falling:
One. Concupiscence
Two. Moral dissolution
Three. Misguided definition of success divorced from a moral code
Four. Denial
Five. Illusion of invincibility
Six. Insanity resulting from living a bubble of sycophants
Jeff Henderson's Fall Results in Too Much Denial
Some Denial Is Necessary for Sanity, But Too Much Denial Leads to Insanity and Moral Dissolution
We need a certain amount of denial to be sane. For example, we should not face the raw, bald reality of our most egregious personal defects and weaknesses.
Otherwise, we'll be bogged down in the paralysis of self-obsession and self-loathing and we would be worthless. Let's say we're not as kind as we'd like to be.
We can't go around muttering to ourselves, "I lack the milk of human kindness" over and over. Otherwise, we'll go insane.
Another example is ugly photographs of you. I'm talking about photographs that make you look so ugly you cringe and wince with disbelief.
Photographers say most of us are more photogenic on our left side.
THROW THOSE UGLY PHOTOS AWAY NOW! Before people put them on the internet.
If you walk around life with an image of yourself based on the ugliest photographs ever taken of you, you'll never leave the house; you'll never get a date; you'll die lonely.
Try to focus on the more flattering photographs of yourself.
Is this a form of delusion? Maybe. But it's a good delusion, one that preserves your sanity.
A personal example: I hate the sound of my voice when someone plays it back on a taperecorder.
Solution?
I DON'T LISTEN TO MY RECORDED VOICE.
Otherwise, I'll reel in self-disgust.
Take peanut butter as another example. It's full of cockroach parts, but we eat it without thinking about that disgusting fact.
Or when we eat meat. Few of us contemplate the agony the animals suffered to become meat on our plate.
Or cheap clothing. It's cheap because underage children are making it in third-world country at slave wages. Still enjoying your Gap T-shirt?
To a certain degree, self-delusions are necessary. Otherwise, we don't do much. We'll criticize every move we make.
Fly to a green summit on who to reduce the world's carbon footprint and the private jet you take is blowing carbons into the atmosphere.
Another example is natural disasters. Even though an earthquake, a tsunami or some other disaster can destroy us in the blink of an eye, we have to live our lives as if we have a good shot of living a full, healthy life. Otherwise, we'll be paralyzed by fear.
So we all engage in some denial to some degree.
Taking Denial Too Far
But there is a point where denial no longer preserves our sanity, that denial goes too far and plummets us into the depths of illusion completely disconnected to reality.
We see people on American Idol who think they have the talent to be superstar singers.
Such is the fate of successful drug dealer Jeff Henderson who believes, one, he's invincible and, two, he isn't doing anything wrong: He's just a businessman.
Sometimes When We Think We're "Rising," We're Really in Denial
Examples of Denial
- A woman sees gradual warning signs that her boyfriend is jealous and controlling, but she denies it and before she knows it, she is in the chapel about to give her vows, what will be for her a prison sentence of unbearable hell: physical beatings and psychological abuse.
- A man is a major drug dealer but minimizes the harm of his actions by telling everyone he is not a drug user, a gang-banger, or a killer. He’s just a “business man.”
- A man doesn't believe he has a snoring problem until his wife plays him a tape-recording of his sleep apnea.
- A man cheats on his girlfriend, convinces her that he did not cheat and has a hard time “forgiving” his girlfriend for questioning his fidelity.
- An El Camino student hangs out with college dropout buddies who never really grew up. Their lives center on “having a good time,” which is the usual fare of male bonding, bragging about their endless series of immature relationships, gossiping about their latest exploits, etc. This student can’t acknowledge that his “buddies” are emotional retards distracting him from his more important goals, such as succeeding in college. Even more disturbing, he fails to admit that his “buddies” are haters who want him to fail because crabs always pinch the top crab straddling the bucket and pull the crab back in before it can escape.
Two. The Causes of Denial
- When you lie to yourself enough times, you begin to believe that your lie is a truth. This is the beginning of insanity.
- When your whole life becomes a collection of lies that you’ve convinced yourself are truths, you are walking around Planet Earth with your head up your butt.
- Denial is also brought upon by the gradual worsening of a situation. You acclimate to gradual developments so that you don’t see what is happening to you or your don’t want to see it. We can call this Suffering Acclimation. The pain is so gradual we can get used to it.
- Acclimation allows you to adapt to an extreme situation so that is doesn’t seem extreme to you. Making $100,000 a month in easy money isn’t normal to us, but it was normal to Jeff Henderson during his drug dealing days. In other words, craziness becomes the “new normal.”
- Denial is caused by the ego, which says, “These things can’t be happening because of me. I’m essentially a good person. I don’t deserve this.” Such is Jeff Henderson’s position during his initial arrest and imprisonment.
- When the ego embraces denial to escape personal accountability, the result is nihilism, the death of morals and meaning. In other words, “you don’t give a damn about anything.” That’s nihilism. See page 110 in which Jeff Henderson says he doesn’t care about anything. He doesn’t want to get his life together. He just wants to lift weights and “kick it” with his homies. That’s nihilism.
- When you're surrounded by sycophants, they tell you what you want to hear, not the truth, so you live in a bubble of denial.
Jeff Henderson interview with Tavis Smiley (about 11 minutes)
Writing an Introduction About Your Personal Struggle with Denial
I’ve been working out most of my life. As a kid I remember family and friends looking at photographs of Arnold Schwarzenegger and other bodybuilders and exclaiming how “gross” and “freakish” these “musclemen” were. In contrast, I thought these bodybuilders looked normal. From my point of view, it was the average guy, a tomato with four toothpicks sticking out it, who looked woeful.
At 13, I was a Junior Olympic Weightlifting champion. At 19, I took second place in Mr. Teenage San Francisco. I know the confidence and satisfaction that results from looking muscular and lean and I know, ever since my metabolism slowed down in my early thirties, the chagrin and displeasure of having a Pillsbury Dough Boy coat of flab over my frame.
No time did I experience this humiliation more than in the summer of 2003 at the age of 42. My wife Carrie and I were walking back from the brunch buffet at the Sheraton Inn in Kauai where I had just ingested a 7,000-calorie breakfast of macadamia nut pancakes, French toast made with Hawaiian sweet bread, turkey sausage patties, and scrambled eggs with melted cheddar all washed down with several tall glasses of freshly-squeezed orange juice. As I strutted my 259-pounds outside the buffet room and past a hotel window, I saw the reflection of a portly gentleman, dressed in safari shorts and a turquoise tank top, which sported the striking image of the iconic sea turtle. This unsightly man I gazed upon looked like the stereotype of an overfed American.
I walked closer toward the bloated image and I was overcome by the shock and anxiety that the reflection was not some other guy for whom I could judge with gleeful ridicule but was me. I was that dude, the type of person whom I had mocked and scorned most of my life.
This was a huge moment for me, what literary people might call an “epiphany,” and I was fortunate to have experienced it. Most people are denied, or deny themselves, such moments of clarity. It is my belief that something like 95% of the human race walk around Planet Earth with their heads up their butts and this is how they die—never knowing what the hell is really going on. But on that summer day in Kauai when I saw that the corpulent man in the window was in fact me, my head uncorked from my butt and I was able to see reality for what it really was. And this reality—me being a chubster—was totally unacceptable. Something had to be done.
Jeff Henderson, too, suffers from having his head up his butt as he denies the evil of his "business endeavor," that of a silver-tongued drug dealer. We see that denial was just one factor that descended him deeper and deeper into a life of crime and made him believe that when he was rising, he was actually sinking. Conversely, when he thought he was sinking, he was actually rising evidenced by ________________, _________________, ___________________, and ______________________.
Perdition and Redemption
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
perseverance 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 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
Sample Analytical Thesis
Jeff Henderson's fall from grace and redemption are comprised of _______________, ____________________, ________________________, _________________________, and _________________________.
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.
We read that in the latest study by the Institute for Higher Education, Leadership & Policy at Cal State Sacramento that only 30% of California community college students are transferring or getting their degrees. We have a real challenge in the community college if 70% are falling by the wayside.
8,000 students walk through El Camino's Humanities Building every week. Only 10% will pass English 1A. Only 3% will pass English 1C.
99% of my students acknowledge that most students at El Camino are seriously compromised by their smartphone addiction to the point that the addiction is making them fail or do non-competitive work in college.
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?
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