Sentence Fragment Review
Don’t allow gerunds and participles to stand alone.
Running toward the buffet table.
Running toward the buffet table is dangerous. (gerund noun phrase)
Running toward the buffet table, Mo tripped and broke his wrist. (participle phrase modifies Mo, so it’s also called an adjective phrase)
Eating bucket-fulls of cashew and walnut pesto larded with Parmesan cheese.
Eating bucket-fulls of cashew and walnut pesto larded with Parmesan cheese can lead to a heart attack. (gerund noun phrase)
Eating bucket-fulls of cashew and walnut pesto larded with Parmesan cheese, Augustine was oblivious of his girlfriend who sat across from him at the table looking at his exhibition of gluttony with horror and disgust. (participle phrase that modifies Augustine).
Augustine dreams of eating a ricotta pound cake smothered with whipped cream and strawberries. (gerund noun phrase is the object of the sentence)
Faulty
Elliot was a vulgar philistine. Evidenced by a love of gold and sequin-encrusted toilets.
Corrected
Elliot was a vulgar philistine evidenced by a love of gold and sequin-encrusted toilets.
Don’t let prepositional phrases stand alone.
A prepositional phrase starts with a preposition.
Under the bridge, the Red Hot Chili Peppers rock star contemplated the emptiness of his life and wrote “Under the Bridge.”
Faulty
I enjoyed my run. In spite of your choice to abandon me and leave me to run alone in the rain. (prepositional phrase can’t stand alone)
Corrected
I enjoyed my run in spite of your choice to abandon me and leave me to run alone in the rain.
Don’t let an appositional phrase stand alone.
An appositional phrase is a the use of phrase to rename a noun.
My father, a military man, speaks in a loud, bombastic voice.
I listen to the loud voice of my father, a military man.
Faulty
I dreamed last night that I was sitting behind the wheel of a Lexus GS350. One of the greatest cars ever built.
Corrected
I dreamed last night that I was sitting behind the wheel of a Lexus GS350, one of the greatest cars ever built.
Faulty
In 1969, I swooned over my third grade classmate Patty Wilson. A pulchritudinous goddess from another planet.
Corrected
In 1969, I swooned over my third grade classmate Patty Wilson, a pulchritudinous goddess from another planet.
Don’t let an infinitive phrase stand alone. An infinitive phrase is a “to verb,” which is not a real verb.
To know me is to love me.
Faulty
Working in his lab for ten years, Dr. Kragen was obsessed with creating a new type of Greek yogurt. To see if he could create a yogurt with 100 grams of protein per cup.
Working in his lab for ten years, Dr. Kragen was obsessed with creating a new type of Greek yogurt to see if he could create a yogurt with 100 grams of protein per cup.
Don’t let an adjective clause stand alone.
An adjective clause is that or which followed by a subject and a verb.
I like cars that feel like they’ve been built with care and precision.
Spotify, which I joined last year, has kept me from spending money on iTunes.
Faulty
I spend most of my listening time on Spotify. Which costs me ten dollars a month and saves me from spending up to $100 a month on iTunes.
Corrected
I spend most of my listening time on Spotify, which costs me ten dollars a month and saves me from spending up to $100 a month on iTunes.
Don’t let an adverbial clause stand alone.
An adverbial clause modifies a verb.
I like to do my kettlebell workouts when my twins are in school.
When it’s too hot to exercise, I slog through my kettlebell workouts.
Faulty
I tend to inhale gallons of rocky road chocolate chip ice cream. As a depressive reaction to “Lonely Night Saturdays.”
Corrected
I tend to inhale gallons of rocky road chocolate chip ice cream as a depressive reaction to “Lonely Night Saturdays.”
Don’t let any long phrase or clause be confused with a complete sentence.
Faulty
Although I studied herpetology and kinesiology during my stay in the Peruvian mountains while keeping warm in the hides of Alpaca and other mountain-dwelling bovine creatures.
Corrected
Although I studied herpetology and kinesiology during my stay in the Peruvian mountains while keeping warm in the hides of Alpaca and other mountain-dwelling bovine creatures, I feel I didn’t retain much information during my two-year stay there.
Essay Two, drawn from the book From Inquiry to Academic Writing, Is Due October 17: Choose One:
Writing Assignment Option 1
In the context of the Media Studies essays in Chapter 13, support, refute, or complicate Turkle’s argument that technology is degrading our humanity in many ways, not the least of which is our “tethered self.” Be sure your 1,250-word essay has a counterargument section and three sources in your Works Cited page.
My 1A students wrote on this topic, and they may quote from their papers, but they cannot re-submit their 1A papers because turnitin will correctly find them committing plagiarism. Because this topic is so urgent, we must confront it again if we wrote this in 1A and 1C, and I won't deny this topic to my 1C students who did not take my 1A class.
You have to remember the history of world religions is this:
One. Paganism
Two. Monotheism
Three. Consumerism (after the Industrial Revolution and advent of mass media)
Four. Social Media It's All About Me-Ism (only 10 years old. This is new stuff we're still processing. We're living the beginning of a new period of history.
Writing Assignment Option 2
In the context of Sherry Turkle's essay "Growing Up Tethered" (428) and CNN's video "Being Thirteen: The Secret World of Teens," develop a cause and effect thesis that addresses the special vulnerabilities 13-year-olds face as they navigate through the morass of social media.
Writing Assignment Option 3
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that Kozol’s essay about poor schools is just the tip of the iceberg about a great scandal in which America neglects, abuses, and exploits the poor while patting itself on the back for being the land of the free. Be sure to have a counterargument section in your 1,250-word essay and a Works Cited page with 3 sources minimum.
Writing Assignment Option 4
In the context of Beverly Daniel Tatum’s essay (374), develop a thesis that analyzes the causes and effects of “oppositional identity” as the driving force behind the “psychology of being black.”
Writing Assignment Option 5
Apply Beverly Daniel Tatum’s theory of “oppositional identity” to the racial divide evidenced during the O.J. Simpson Trial.
Writing Assignment Option 6 (adapted from book):
In a 1,250-word essay, develop an analytical thesis that compares the denigration of education that you see in Edmundson’s essay (389) and Kozol’s (347). Draw examples from your own education as you develop your thesis.
Writing Assignment Option 7
Developing Hooks’ idea in “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor” (482) that the poor are painted with negative stereotypes in various stratums of society (media, college, TV, movies, popular culture, etc.), draw insights from Hooks’ essay to analyze the way you see common social class stereotypes perpetuated in your daily life be it college, friends, family, movies, or TV. You may want to use a personal interview. Your essay should be 1,250 words and have 3 sources for your Works Cited page.
Addendum: Too often, perhaps, Americans make poor people synonymous with stupidity, disease, helplessness, moral bankruptcy, and victimhood.
And the converse is true: Too often Americans make rich people synonymous with intelligence, virtue, inventiveness, innovation, self-reliance, moral superiority, and Darwinian advantage.
Perhaps these stereotypes speak to our greatest fears and desires and these fears and desires are codified and reinforced in consumer and media images.
Writing Assignment Option 8
Defend, refute, or complicate Hooks' assertion that the poor, contrary to the perception of "progressive intellectuals from privileged classes," can lead "a rich and meaningful life." Does Hooks provide enough context in her essay to defend such a position? Why are we as Americans horrified by poverty, not just from an economic, but a psychological sense? How do Hooks' views of the poor differ from most Americans'?
Writing Assignment Option 9
Defend, refute, or complicate Hooks' defense of the poor. Is poverty a virtue? Does poverty encourage integrity? Does poverty encourage moral values? Why? Why not? Explain.
Writing Assignment Option 10
In a 1,250-word essay, show how Kozol’s essay, “Still Separate, Still Unequal,” complements Ravitch’s argument that we need a macro view of the educational disparity crisis. Be sure to have a counterargument section and a Works Cited page with 3 sources minimum.
“Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor” by Bell Hooks
Introduction to Social Class
Introduction: Defining Class
Adam Carolla defines hippies as people who are part angry, part depressed, and part lazy. They fail to achieve the American Dream, Carolla argues, because of their laziness and mediocrity, so they construct a worldview that justifies their state of not having things. They see a Mercedes driver, a person driving the hippy's unacknowledged dream car, and say the Mercedes driver is a bad, immoral person. The hippy, Carolla argues, is envious of those who have luxury products and constructs a world where bad people own those luxuries.
Listening to Carolla, I felt guilty for not buying a Breitling and a Mercedes, as if the absence of those objects in my life is evidence of my laziness and mediocrity. Of course, I'm engaging in over simplistic thinking. My discretionary income should be reserved for my twins' college and my not spending it on luxuries I don't need is not evidence that I'm a lazy hippy. However, Carolla's philosophy speaks to our perception of class division in America.
For Carolla, hippy is a code word for bum, malcontent, envious outcast, indolent miscreant, and sloth.
The implication is that the opposite is a virtue: someone with high earning power who buys his dream possessions evidences his intelligence and hard work. He is a producer while the hippy is a taker.
This binary universe is saddled with logical fallacies and compromised by complexities and nuances, but the point is real: Americans look at those who "made it" and those who didn't. It's the difference between heaven and hell on Earth.
Other Ways of Looking at Class: The Worship of Power
When we talk about class, we're not really talking about earning power as a sign of upward class mobility. Earning power is part of class, but is actually only a small part of it.
Another idea of class in America is the idea of mobility and ascent. When we climb the ladder, we use the term arriviste or upstart to describe someone who has gone from "rags to riches."
Part of the American Dream of upward class mobility is going to college and getting a bachelor's degree. Americans see college as a ticket to moving from a lower class to a higher class.
We find, though, that less than 14% community college students transfer to college and get a bachelor's. Therefore, this American Dream is not as "easy pickings" as we'd often like to believe. The American Dream is hardly the low hanging fruit that's free for the taking like it was post World War II through the late 1970s for privileged white people.
Getting to the Heart of Social Class: Perception and Identity
Aside from going up the economic ladder and defining class in sheer numbers, social class is more about identity and the way others perceive us in terms of our rank or status.
So what we are really talking about is a particular type of American class status, the ranking system that exists uniquely in America. How people perceive us in the American ranking system, and how we perceive ourselves, defines our class.
We are dependent on validation and often addicted to flattery, so we rely on status cues or status symbols to receive the validation and flattery we crave.
Being able to afford first-class airline tickets is not just about luxury; it's about asserting one's privilege over the "common folk" sardined together in coach.
Material possessions, too, often point to this flattery. For example, a "Platinum" or "Limited" edition car makes us feel special, better, and privileged. And we want others to see this special designation on our car's nameplate.
Social Class and the Shame Factor
Mythology feeds a lot of our ideas about social class. For example, the rich, according to mythology, are rich because of their alleged superior character. They got rich because they were disciplined, hard-working, and willing to sacrifice.
Poor people are poor, the mythology goes, because of bad character such as laziness and bad choices.
In other words, we attribute virtue to the rich and exact shame on those who lack earning power. For example, some schools give "shame sandwiches" to students who are behind in their payments.
To be judged as poor is equivalent to being consigned to the hell of ostracism, shame, and stigmatization. Poverty is not just a monetary state but a psychological state as well.
To be judged poor in America is to suffer the worst mockery in line with Honey Boo Boo and Mamma June.
Class Privilege, Whiteness, and the Uppity Factor
During times of slavery and Jim Crow, the United States was racially segregated. Therefore, for many years the idea of social class was based on "whiteness" or white privilege. Aspiring to "be white," that is molding oneself on stereotypes of "desirable white behaviors," for many decades was a sign of class. This thing we call whiteness has a certain pretentiousness, hauteur, grandiosity, superciliousness, privilege and entitlement in creating this aura of being "uppity" and "bourgie," a truncated version of the word bourgeoisie and pronounced boo-zhee.
A hipster is the same pretentious person who puts on the same act of grandiosity, but does so with more irony, false self-deprecation, and higher fashion.
To be uppity and pretentious in America traditionally was to study the body language and linguistic codes of white privilege.
To be uppity, a person of white privilege did not only disdain people of different ethnicities and races. The white uppity snob also scorned uneducated white people, who were deemed "peasants" or docile sheep or "trailer trash."
America's history began with the notion of lower class white peasants being undesirable and a sign of what not to be. We have scorned "white trash" since American settlers came to America from Europe.
We read in Nancy Isenberg's White Trash that 400 years ago, Europe sent its "trash" to America to do menial work. Ugly caricatures of white trash were widespread in media, cartoons, educational tracts. These caricatures were propagated by politicians, theologians, philosophers, and those who peddled ideas to the masses.
Class Consciousness Continues to Flourish
Today Americans of all races are obsessed with the codes that make up social class, the hierarchy or ranking system by which we judge our fellow Americans. Knowingly or not, we use a set of codes to ascribe class rank on others and ourselves.
The 6 Class Codes
The six major class codes that rank us in America's hierarchy system are the following:
One. Your zip code:
According to Paul Fussell, the higher the concentration of bowling alleys in a zip code, the lower the class ranking. Another sign of low social ranking is a zip code in which daycare centers are ten feet away from "gentleman's clubs."
A KFC making millions of revenue in a poor zip code is looked upon as a crack house and banned from a rich zip code.
A combination Pizza Hut-Taco Bell is relegated to poor zip codes as parodied in this song.
Two. Your education rank:
Your education is evidenced by not only your diploma but your body language, speech cadence and inflection, vocabulary, your sphere of travel, and your grasp of irony.
Education is also evidenced by speaking many languages, being well traveled, and showing exceptional talent in the arts such as music, painting, and writing.
These characteristics make up one's educational status.
Three. Your professional designation:
Terms such as blue-collar ascribe working or lower class. White-collar ascribes upper or middle class. One of the highest classes is the creative class, a term popularized by writer Richard Florida. Creating software and computer apps or being a professor at a prestigious university are examples of the creative class. Working in the arts, media, and design are other examples.
Four. Your tastes in art, music, entertainment, fashion, transportation, and leisure:
Class is more than earning power. It is revealed in our tastes. Are our tastes cultivated, current, and educated, and nuanced? Or are they tacky? Tacky is a word associated with low class. Other similar words to describe low class taste are crass, gauche, gaudy, uncouth, unctuous, vulgar, tawdry, and if you want to show off your education, you can use the Russian word poshlost, which means vulgar banality or something that is produced with huge effort to show off but is grotesque and without imagination or humanity. Some people have used the word poshlost to describe vulgar people who define themselves only by their material possessions. Such people are also called philistines.
Bad taste is "bling that tries too hard" like putting 20 inch chrome wheels on a 1999 Nissan Altima or decorating one's front lawn with gnomes, lambs, lions, flamingos, butlers, Buddhas, gargoyles, etc.
In Orange County, a "housewife" has a gold-trimmed round crib with a chandelier over it.
A sequin-encrusted toilet means you're trying too hard.
A man's diamond gold wristwatch is a sad display of trying too hard.
Any notion of "luxury" from the bowels of Las Vegas is a tasteless abomination.
Five. Your use of language:
Your vocabulary, cadence, inflection, intonation, lilt, and accent (not necessarily dependent on going to college; you could be autodidactic) are all part of linguistic code you use that determines your social class. Casually using words like interstitial, hauteur, verisimilitude, sycophantic, and synecdoche evidences someone of an educated and therefore higher class. The trick to using the aforementioned words is never sounding like you're trying to use them. Rather, they are part of your natural, casual conversation.
Forcing the word verisimilitude into conversation is the equivalent of sitting on a sequin-encrusted toilet.
Six. Your grasp of irony:
Irony is the wry, sly, and sometimes sarcastic orientation of the educated cosmopolitan, the person who is a connoisseur of life's absurdities, contradictions, and ironic reversals. As a connoisseur of irony, the high-class cosmopolitan is not shocked by life's absurdities, but greets them with an expected sly grin.
Connoisseurs of irony are also experts at subtle self-deprecation, which gives the implicit message that they are too intelligent to take vanity and self-aggrandizement seriously even though their constant self-deprecation can often be an earnest attempt at being morally superior to those who don't efface themselves with equal rigor.
Conclusion
Where you live, what degree of education you have, what kind of job you have, how you dress, and entertain yourself, and how you speak all are part of the class code by which our fellow Americans judge and rank us according to the hierarchy system.
Let us be clear: Your class can even determine your happiness and life expectancy, as we read in "All Hollowed Out," an article that would make a good resource.
Also consult "America's self-destructive whites."
And consult "Why Are White Death Rates Rising?"
One. What is Hooks’ complaint about intellectuals when it comes to discussions of the poor?
Hooks contends that intellectuals sugar coat their language using terms like “underclass” or “economically disenfranchised,” terms, she believes, obscure the situation of poverty. Straight language, not pretentious academic euphemisms, is better. Call them what they are: poor.
Perhaps academic language makes the problem of poverty more abstract and tends to minimize human suffering.
Perhaps calling them part of the "underclass" is a loaded word that suggests the writer's sociological agenda. He wishes to ascribe some deeper meaning to being poor that does not exist.
In Hooks’ experience, she was poor even though her father was “working class.”
Additionally, Hooks saw the world as consisting of the “haves and the have-nots.”
Breaking down class further, there are four groups:
One. The poor, who are destitute
Two. The poor, who can barely make ends meet
Three. Those that work and have extra money or gravy
Four. The rich, those who don’t have to even work. They’re just rich.
Two. How is Hooks torn by her class status?
On one hand, Hooks is a successful academic, a member of the “professional-managerial class.” On the other hand, she doesn’t wallow in her elevated status because she still lives from a standpoint of money. She observes, “I mainly think about the world in terms of who has money to spend and who does not. Like many technically middle-class folks who are connected in economic responsibility to kinship structures where they provide varying material support for others, the issue is always one of money.
Because Hooks’ identity is rooted in being poor and because she knows who the poor are, as opposed to media’s false representations of the poor, Hooks does not have a negative view of poor people. She writes, “Poverty was no disgrace in our household. We were socialized early on, by grandparents and parents, to assume that nobody’s value could be measured by moral standards.”
This is a huge contrast, the toxic American myth of Success, which says rich people are rich because they are virtuous, morally good, hard working, disciplined, etc.
In contrast, America’s toxic Success Myth demonizes the poor: They Myth accuses the poor of deserving their poverty, of being lazy, of lacking character, etc.
In Hook’s world, “Value was connected to integrity,” not money.
Three. How did college represent the poor?
Hooks writes that they, the privileged students and professors, “almost always portrayed the poor as shiftless, mindless, lazy, dishonest, and unworthy.”
During Hooks’ studies, she was shocked and offended that the poor were represented as having no values.
Adding to this heinous myth against poor people, Hooks learned through her encounters that “successful” and “educated” people could be average in intelligence or plain stupid or ignorant, or all of the above.
Another misrepresentation of the poor is in popular culture. The poor are looked at as being beholden by abject greed and materialism.
Hooks observes that the result of these heinous stereotypes is that many poor, especially from the young generation, suffer a shame, a stigma, and a low self-esteem, which is “crippling.”
For Hooks, the solution to this class warfare is to be a political activist who helps redistribute the wealth more fairly and to help build literacy with the poor because literacy empowers people to fend off the stigmas generated by America’s heinous myths against poor people.
“Still Separate, Still Unequal” by Jonathan Kozol
One. What is America’s Myth of Equality, and how does Kozol dismantle this myth?
America prides itself on the following narrative: Rich or poor, you are in America, the land of the American Dream, where all people, rich or poor, can get a good education, climb up the social and economic ladder and live the Dream that makes America the greatest country in the world.
To the contrary, Kozol finds American schools polarized by racial demographics and economic status.
Poor cities are racially segregated and have nothing: book, clean supplies, infrastructure, teachers who stay on the job for a significant tenure, and the latest technology. There is no music, art, computer tech, recreation, and outdoor exercise. School is a prison, a daycare center, and a place to sort out students into their “proper place.”
The schools are overcrowded and violent. Students go to school to survive, not flourish in education.
Poor students are trained to be “burger flippers” and work in the lowest tiers of the economic ladder. Teachers and principals work together to keep students from becoming incarcerated by giving them vocational training to work in retail and managerial positions.
The net effect of all this is the reinforcement of the gap between the haves and have-nots.
Perhaps what is most depressing is that Kozol, a best-selling author, is a voice for the poor, but his voice notwithstanding, there is no critical mass to help the poor, there is no political will to help the poor, there is no significant movement in this country to help the poor. As we read in Bell Hooks' essay, no one is interested in the poor.
It’s difficult to get traction when it comes to championing the needs of the poor. Mainstream America doesn’t get serious about changing anything until the crisis hits their home. That’s human nature: People talk a good talk, but don’t get serious until the crisis blows up in their face.
In fact, it’s in everyone’s interest to help minimize the underclass. Poverty breeds crime, and the last thing the haves want to do is seclude themselves like prisoners in their gated communities because they’re afraid of “what the have-nots are doing out there.”
The trash, filth, and lack of adequate resources at the inner city school, Kozol observes, would be unacceptable in a middle class white school. A principal of a poor school where a garbage bag is holding debris from a collapsing building is in despair. The principal says, “This . . . would not happen to white children.”
There are toxins, mold, lead, and carcinogenic pollutants at the poor schools while these hazards would not be allowed to be present at middle-class schools. In fact, such a presence would be cause for scandal and lawsuits, but not so in poor schools. Subjecting the poor to health hazards with impunity is “business as usual.”
There is no pre-school available in many poor areas. Such is not the case in middle-class communities.
This is the crux of the matter. The threshold of what’s acceptable for the poor and often people of color in this country is far different than what is acceptable for middle-class white students.
The poor cities up to half the men are in the prison system. This would be unacceptable in a white neighborhood.
There are no doctors to attend the health needs of the poor schools. This would be unacceptable in middle-class white schools.
The crime rate in poor neighborhoods would be unacceptable in middle-class white neighborhoods.
There are “food deserts,” places absent of real food, in poor communities while middle-class communities have an abundance of healthy food choices.
The government preys on the poor by putting them into a debtor’s prison. Such a prison doesn’t happen to the middle-class. We see this in the form of municipal violations, which are well chronicled in a John Oliver presentation.
Over and over again, we see a pattern: The threshold for what’s acceptable is different in poor and middle-class environments.
The broader implication of Kozol’s essay is that we are an immoral country. We value people based on their abundance, or absence, of money instead of valuing human life on principles of justice and fairness. We are a morally bankrupt country, yet we are in love with our Sweet-Smelling Myth of Equality and the American Dream. Our only dream is Greed and “I’ve Got Mine, Get Yours.”
If you really want to get depressed, you can face the fact that the problem is more systemic than schools. The problem is about the way we abuse, neglect, and exploit the have-nots while affording more rights to the haves.
Kozol points the finger at our hypocrisy. He writes, “There is something deeply hypocritical about a society that hold an eight-year-old inner-city child ‘accountable’ for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years earlier.
As it turns out, these standardized tests make billions for the companies that make them, are corrupt with graders chosen from Craig’s List ad (see John Oliver video), have failed to improve math and writing skills; however, the makers of these standardized tests have never been held accountable as their companies make billions of dollars.
Writing Assignment Option
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that Kozol’s essay about poor schools is just the tip of the iceberg about a great scandal in which America neglects, abuses, and exploits the poor while patting itself on the back for being the land of the free. Be sure to have a counterargument section in your 1,000-word essay and a Works Cited page with 3 sources minimum.
Writer Who Supports Kozol’s Thesis
Contrary to the America’s dream of upward mobility, our country stacks the deck for the rich and against the poor as evidenced persuasively in Kozol’s essay. We see this moral bankruptcy in terms of disparities of what’s deemed acceptable in one economic stratum and what’s deemed acceptable in another. These disparities point to a deep moral bankruptcy that reveals America’s dream of equality to be a bald-faced lie.
Writer Who Complicates Kozol’s Thesis
Of course, we live in a two-tiered society with the haves and have-nots. We don’t need Kozol’s cry-baby-sodden research to tell us this. The pleasures we, the privileged, enjoy are predicated on servile class that attends our needs. This is not unique to America but universal. We need janitors, manual workers, and the like. We ferret out the strongest and brightest from the working class and give them some reward. But the weak, as they always have, are fated to serve the strong. This universal Darwinism is inevitable. Therefore, we are not compelled to condemn America’s alleged “moral bankruptcy.”
Option 10
Defend, refute, or complicate Hooks' assertion that the poor, contrary to the perception of "progressive intellectuals from privileged classes," can lead "a rich and meaningful life." Does Hooks provide enough context in her essay to defend such a position? Why are we as Americans horrified by poverty, not just from an economic, but a psychological sense? How do Hooks' views of the poor differ from most Americans'?
Writer Who Supports Bell Hooks’ Thesis
Hooks persuasively argues that the poor are not looked at as human being capable of having a rich inner life and strong moral values but as a diseased lot of victims who exist beneath the level of human beings evidenced by the way both the Left and the Right paint the poor as “unfortunate casualties” of an unjust political system, morally bankrupt ne’er-do-wells who’ve dug their own grave, or intellectually challenged sloths incapable of adapting to a Darwinian universe.
Writer Who Complicates Bell Hooks’ Thesis
While I admire Bell Hooks’ largely persuasive defense of the poor, I cannot drink Hooks’ Kool-Aid because my own lust for money gives me an aversion to poverty, I cannot imagine identifying economic impoverishment with the rich inner life Bell Hooks describes because all I see is depression and misery when I think of being poor, and my Darwinian instincts repel me from the vulnerabilities and self-harm I associate with poverty.
John Oliver HBO Video on Municipal Violations
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