Sources
“Gender, Class, and Terrorism” by Michael S. Kimmel
One. What is the author’s purpose for comparing two terrorists, Timothy McVeigh and Mohammed Atta?
He wants to explore both men’s pathology through “the lens of gender” to see what influences misogyny has on their terrorist sensibilities.
Both men suffer a “spiral of downward mobility.”
Both are hostile toward global capitalism.
Both are hostile to “The Other.” In McVeigh’s case, it’s immigrants; in Atta’s case, it’s the infidels.
Both see women as gaining on men, and this must be stopped.
Both feel emasculated as they rely more and more on “a rhetoric of masculinity,” which is the idea that male empowerment is being threatened by all The Other forces.
Assimilating into the system and becoming a middle-class consumer is just another form of emasculation, of “being a softy.”
Both believe masculinity must be restored by showing the world “who’s in charge.”
Both believe that manhood is expressed through Rambo-like military operations.
Both believe that God sanctions their violent missions.
Both see the world as hostile to their manly supremacy, so it is better to start from scratch, from a place of nihilism, or nothing, and such a leveling of the field requires mass destruction.
Both see the power of The Other as a form of humiliation and emasculation. The Taliban, for example, saw Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan as a humiliation.
Men must be “remasculinized” and women “refeminized” by going back to the Old Order of things.
The Taliban would not let women, The Other, be educated because educated women compete against men and thus emasculate them.
Two. What problem do I have with all these explanations of McVeigh and Atta’s evil?
Whenever we explain evil, there is an implied excusing of it. We somehow lessen the virulence and magnitude of the evil by giving it some tidy psychoanalysis.
Even if I concede that some of the above is true, resentful, envious, anti-social people who seek power by hurting others are odious, evil human beings who hardly deserve the dignity of a tidy psychoanalysis.
I am morally repelled by the naïve proposition that “If we just understand people better, we’ll be able to make peace with them.”
Three. What do McVeigh, Atta, and Hitler have in common?
They all seethe with a sense of masculine entitlement.
They are all failures in their earlier aspirations and these failures inflicted them with a sense of humiliation.
They were all misfits.
They all suffered from a deep-set emasculation, which compelled them to perform acts of self-aggrandizement even if those acts entailed violence, or I should say, especially those acts that entailed violence since violence was their fuel for feeling powerful.
For all three, it wasn’t enough to get mad; they had to get even.
Essay Writing Option 4
In a 1,250-word essay, support, refute, or complicate the contention that Chapter 14's essay selections persuasively show that one of America's central, ongoing conflicts is between the advantaged and those who are categorized as "The Other."
Suggested Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Kimmel's essay.
Paragraph 2, your thesis, argue how convincing, or not, Kimmel is in his assertion that a culture that emasculates males makes them feel like Misfits or "The Other" and these male misfits act out in violence and sometimes even terrorism. The only solution is a new model of masculinity. Sample thesis:
American males, like the Middle Eastern terrorists, feel emasculated and this emasculation causes anti-social behavior rooted in misogyny, fanatical allegiance to a dangerous ideology, and a sense of betrayal from society's institutions. As a society, we must replace men's old model of masculinity with a new model based on the type of feminism Kimmel describes.
Paragraphs 3 through 8 would support your thesis.
Paragraph 9, your conclusion, would be a restatement of your thesis.
“The Rise of the Rest” by Fareed Zakaria (816)
One. What are the three tectonic shifts of the last 500 years?
Fundamental shifts in power are what we are referring to when we say “tectonic shifts.”
The first is the rise of the Western world in the fifteenth century, which ushered modernity, science, and technology.
The second, occurring at the end of the nineteenth century, was the rise of the United States, the greatest super power since imperial Rome.
The third shift is “the rise of the rest.” Economic growth has now globalized. The tallest building is now in Taipei and will soon be overtaken by Dubai, we read. Further, the richest man is from Mexico, the largest publically traded company is from China, the largest plane from Russia, largest refinery is from India, largest factories from China, largest gambling casino in Macao.
London is becoming the largest financial center.
This is a huge shift in self-image. We used to be the biggest cowboy in the saloon; in fact, the world saw us as a giant John Wayne.
Worldwide, the amount of people living on a dollar a day has gone down from 40 percent in 1981 to 18 percent in 2004. It should fall another 12 percent by 2015.
We are “entering a post-American world.” However, Zakaria doesn’t mention our worldwide dominance in entertainment, computer games, movies, TV, music, dance, etc.
Two. What is Zakaria’s thesis?
He intends to answer the question: “What does it mean to live in a post-America world?”
There will be less international cooperation to solve international crises because America no longer calls the shots. Everyone will do what they deem is in their self-interests first.
Zakaria points out that while Americans take for granted their own patriotism and nationalism, they are shocked when faced with the same patriotism and nationalism in other countries. We can infer from his statement that power has made us narcissistic over the years perhaps.
Also America’s narrative, as the principal character in world history, is now challenged by other countries that resent being “bit players.”
American Workers Will Suffer But the 1% Will Continue to Get Rich in Globalized Economy
Essay Writing Option 8
In a 1,250-word essay, support, refute, or complicate Fareed Zakaria's contention (816) that the American-centered Economic Dominance Myth is becoming replaced with a global reality. What is this alleged myth of American dominance? Is it a myth at all? Explain.
Sample Essay Outline
In paragraph 1, summarize Zakaria's essay.
In paragraph 2, your thesis, analyze the effects of globalization on America's middle and working class. For example:
Globalization, as described by Zakaria, will undermine American democracy in major ways, including ______________, _______________, ___________________, and ____________________.
Paragraphs 3-7 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 8, your conclusion, is a restatement of your thesis.
Writing Assignment Option 1
Develop an argumentative thesis for a 1,250-word essay that addresses race, gender, and privilege in Chapter 14. Be sure to incorporate at least two essays from Chapter 14 to develop your essay.
“How I Discovered the Truth About Poverty” by Barbara Ehrenreich
One. How is the poor class in America a moral reprimand of our country and the myths we uphold to define our country?
We pride ourselves on being a classless society, a fair democracy, and a land of opportunity, opening the gateways to upward mobility, but in fact the invisible class, the poor, are about 25% of our population.
Two. How are the poor another form of “The Other”?
Ehrenreich observes that to be poor is to be built differently as poverty makes us adapt in ways other people don’t adapt. As a result, Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, writes, “To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society.”
Ehrenreich suggests, though, that for Harrington’s good intentions, he is doing a disservice by inadvertently making the poor seem like The Other. In fact, he appears to ignore the poor’s ambition and hard-work ethic because he is so hell-bent on painting them as helpless victims.
Additionally, Harrington spreads the fallacy that the poor are mentally afflicted with some kind of “poverty disease” and we, the affluent readers, need to help them. There is condescension toward poor people in a book that was so influential during its time.
Harrington did all this with good intentions. His works were interpreted by others such as Patrick Moynihan as saying the poor suffer from a pathology like a weak family structure.
Ronald Reagan too added to this pathology interpretation: “The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment. . . . Impulse governs his behavior. . . . He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless. . . [He] has a feeble, attenuated sense of self.”
Such a view paints the poor as children who need extra supervision and policing. Even “chastity training” became part of addressing “the culture of poverty.”
Today, this prejudice against the poor persists.
Three. What narcissistic disease is evident in the way affluent Americans look at the poor?
Ehrenreich points out that for the affluent it’s not about empathy or compassion when dealing with the poor; rather, the affluent see the poor as pathological on one hand. On the other hand, the affluent take this opportunity to congratulate themselves for their superiority. As Ehrenreich writes, “What affluent Americans found in his book, and all the crude conservative diatribes that followed it, was not the poor, but a flattering new way to think about themselves—disciplined, law-abiding, sober, and focused. In other words, not poor.”
We should not hold this self-congratulatory view. Rather, we should see poverty for what it really is: “Poverty is a shortage of money.” Don’t tag some pathology to it.
"10 Poverty Myths, Busted" in Mother Jones
"Debunking the Attempted Debunking of Poverty Myths, Debunked" in Mother Jones
"This Is Why Poor People's Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense" by Linda Tirado
There's no way to structure this coherently. They are random observations that might help explain the mental processes. But often, I think that we look at the academic problems of poverty and have no idea of the why. We know the what and the how, and we can see systemic problems, but it's rare to have a poor person actually explain it on their own behalf. So this is me doing that, sort of.
Rest is a luxury for the rich. I get up at 6AM, go to school (I have a full course load, but I only have to go to two in-person classes) then work, then I get the kids, then I pick up my husband, then I have half an hour to change and go to Job 2. I get home from that at around 12:30AM, then I have the rest of my classes and work to tend to. I'm in bed by 3. This isn't every day, I have two days off a week from each of my obligations. I use that time to clean the house and soothe Mr. Martini and see the kids for longer than an hour and catch up on schoolwork. Those nights I'm in bed by midnight, but if I go to bed too early I won't be able to stay up the other nights because I'll fuck my pattern up, and I drive an hour home from Job 2 so I can't afford to be sleepy. I never get a day off from work unless I am fairly sick. It doesn't leave you much room to think about what you are doing, only to attend to the next thing and the next. Planning isn't in the mix.
When I got pregnant the first time, I was living in a weekly motel. I had a minifridge with no freezer and a microwave. I was on WIC. I ate peanut butter from the jar and frozen burritos because they were 12/$2. Had I had a stove, I couldn't have made beef burritos that cheaply. And I needed the meat, I was pregnant. I might not have had any prenatal care, but I am intelligent enough to eat protein and iron whilst knocked up.
I know how to cook. I had to take Home Ec to graduate high school. Most people on my level didn't. Broccoli is intimidating. You have to have a working stove, and pots, and spices, and you'll have to do the dishes no matter how tired you are or they'll attract bugs. It is a huge new skill for a lot of people. That's not great, but it's true. And if you fuck it up, you could make your family sick. We have learned not to try too hard to be middle-class. It never works out well and always makes you feel worse for having tried and failed yet again. Better not to try. It makes more sense to get food that you know will be palatable and cheap and that keeps well. Junk food is a pleasure that we are allowed to have; why would we give that up? We have very few of them.
The closest Planned Parenthood to me is three hours. That's a lot of money in gas. Lots of women can't afford that, and even if you live near one you probably don't want to be seen coming in and out in a lot of areas. We're aware that we are not "having kids," we're "breeding." We have kids for much the same reasons that I imagine rich people do. Urge to propagate and all. Nobody likes poor people procreating, but they judge abortion even harder.
Convenience food is just that. And we are not allowed many conveniences. Especially since the Patriot Act passed, it's hard to get a bank account. But without one, you spend a lot of time figuring out where to cash a check and get money orders to pay bills. Most motels now have a no-credit-card-no-room policy. I wandered around SF for five hours in the rain once with nearly a thousand dollars on me and could not rent a room even if I gave them a $500 cash deposit and surrendered my cell phone to the desk to hold as surety.
Nobody gives enough thought to depression. You have to understand that we know that we will never not feel tired. We will never feel hopeful. We will never get a vacation. Ever. We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor. It doesn't give us much reason to improve ourselves. We don't apply for jobs because we know we can't afford to look nice enough to hold them. I would make a super legal secretary, but I've been turned down more than once because I "don't fit the image of the firm," which is a nice way of saying "gtfo, pov." I am good enough to cook the food, hidden away in the kitchen, but my boss won't make me a server because I don't "fit the corporate image." I am not beautiful. I have missing teeth and skin that looks like it will when you live on B12 and coffee and nicotine and no sleep. Beauty is a thing you get when you can afford it, and that's how you get the job that you need in order to be beautiful. There isn't much point trying.
Cooking attracts roaches. Nobody realizes that. I've spent a lot of hours impaling roach bodies and leaving them out on toothpick pikes to discourage others from entering. It doesn't work, but is amusing.
"Free" only exists for rich people. It's great that there's a bowl of condoms at my school, but most poor people will never set foot on a college campus. We don't belong there. There's a clinic? Great! There's still a copay. We're not going. Besides, all they'll tell you at the clinic is that you need to see a specialist, which seriously? Might as well be located on Mars for how accessible it is. "Low-cost" and "sliding scale" sounds like "money you have to spend" to me, and they can't actually help you anyway.
I smoke. It's expensive. It's also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It's a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and I feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed. It is not a good decision, but it is the only one that I have access to. It is the only thing I have found that keeps me from collapsing or exploding.
I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don't pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It's not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isn't that I blow five bucks at Wendy's. It's that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to. There's a certain pull to live what bits of life you can while there's money in your pocket, because no matter how responsible you are you will be broke in three days anyway. When you never have enough money it ceases to have meaning. I imagine having a lot of it is the same thing.
Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain. It's why you see people with four different babydaddies instead of one. You grab a bit of connection wherever you can to survive. You have no idea how strong the pull to feel worthwhile is. It's more basic than food. You go to these people who make you feel lovely for an hour that one time, and that's all you get. You're probably not compatible with them for anything long-term, but right this minute they can make you feel powerful and valuable. It does not matter what will happen in a month. Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don't plan long-term because if we do we'll just get our hearts broken. It's best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it.
I am not asking for sympathy. I am just trying to explain, on a human level, how it is that people make what look from the outside like awful decisions. This is what our lives are like, and here are our defense mechanisms, and here is why we think differently. It's certainly self-defeating, but it's safer. That's all. I hope it helps make sense of it.
Spotlight on Writing Assignment Option 2
Develop an argumentative thesis for a 5-page essay that addresses consumerism and economics in Chapter 17. Be sure to incorporate at least two essays from Chapter 17 to develop your essay.
Because our textbook has egregiously ignored social media and consumerism to its detriment, we are expanding our essay option to include the growing role of social media and consumerism:
Developing a Newer, Perhaps More Relevant Angle for Your Assignment: Finding the Relationship Between Consumerism and Social Media
In the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" from Season 3, we see a dehumanizing relationship between consumerism and social media:
One. Consumers are vulnerable to a bombardment of social media ratings. Ratings determine our behavior and privilege. We become imprisoned by ratings.
Notice everything today is a rating or a survey. Rate My Professor. Rate My Student. Rate My Doctor. You can rate everything on Yelp. These ratings affect our perceptions of businesses and individuals. Our credibility is on the line.
We engage in mutual sycophantism and become fawning parasites so everyone "likes" us and we "like" them.
We're lazy. We adapt to path of least resistance. If technology gives us an easy way to rank someone, we will eventually accept that ranking as the common currency. We become therefore a slave to the ranking system.
Two. Consumers live in a hierarchy where desirability, social ranking, and class privileges are all determined by social media metrics. It doesn't matter if the metrics are accurate or not. What matters is that the metrics are there and being used. They are the currency. We have no choice. If we shun the ranking system, we become pariahs.
Three. Consumers find a sort of Faustian Bargain or deal with the devil in that they more they ascend social media rankings the more they become vulnerable, helpless, miserable children dependent on social ranking as a compensation that they have never truly developed as human beings. As Sherry Turkle says, we try to "fill the holes in out tattered selves" with "likes."
Part of the Faustian Bargain is we trade real assessments of people for the instant gratification of a ranking. And we rely on our own rankings for the dopamine rush of being "liked" or getting stars. This reliance on such stimulation infantilizes us.
Notice the show's disparity between the sugary infantilized chirpy talk with the underlying rage and the need to vent real emotion.
Four. Related to the above, consumers find that maintaining a chipper, perky facade or facsimile of happiness eventually makes them crack.
Five. We find that the exaggerated condition in "Nosedive" is analogous to what is going on today with Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. For example, people present a fabricated happiness on Facebook and other social media sites. Worse, people become dependent, on an addictive level, to the social approval received.
Six. We find that "Nosedive" already mirrors social credit rating system in China.
Sources for Your Essay:
Initial Impressions Upon Watching "Nosedive"
One. Technology has created the fear of being a pariah on one hand and the chimerical quest to be a "5.0" on the other.
Two. This desperation to avoid pariah status and to enjoy 5.0 status helps manipulate people in the marketplace and keeps them at the childish stage of development.
Three. Social media ranking systems create social stratification, the Us Vs. Them mentality that exists in many societies including Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and H.G. Wells' "The Country of the Blind."
Four. As we conform to the insipid images adorned in social media, imitating celebrated "lifestyles," such as making olive tapenade, we become more like technology and less like ourselves to the point that we lose ourselves.
Five. People are so addicted to ranking and sycophantic flattery they can no longer sustain adult, honest conversation.
Six. As a result of holding back their real emotions in favor of the sycophantic veneer, they build up rage that slowly turns inward and poisons their very being.
Seven. Becoming a 5.0 is the equivalent of becoming the Elect in Christianity while the rest of humanity is damned. Even a techno-secular system such as the one depicted in "Nosedive" has a quasi-religious element.
Eight. Getting high ranking, stars, and "likes" becomes a dopamine rush, which in turn becomes an addiction as an entire society is dependent on the instant gratification of social media feedback.
Nine. The more we become addicted to social media feedback the more we perform our sycophantic acrobats for our cloying audience and the more we placate our cloying audience the more we become an infantilized culture.
Sample Thesis
In "Nosedive's" near-future dystopia our obsession with social media rankings reveals the power of technology to make us obedient, conformist consumers, sycophantic lapdogs desperate for approval, ruthlessly Darwinian haters of the low social order, and childish ciphers absent of any core identity to define ourselves when the social media rankings crash and vanish into pixel dust.
Second Sample Thesis
Part of being a critical thinker is being able to discern between authenticity and the counterfeit. A second crucial component of critical thinking is being able to rank things in the proper order. However, as we see in "Nosedive," social media rankings have upturned our critical thinking facilities by creating a false world of security, a false ranking system, and an insidious consumer matrix from which many never escape.
Third Sample Thesis
Like the dystopia depicted in Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," "Nosedive" is about the ruthless equation of privilege in which one group is afforded high ranking that must be accompanied by a pariah group of low ranking. This privilege system is based on a false ideology in both stories evidenced by _________________, ____________________, _____________________, and _____________________.
Fourth Sample Thesis
"Nosedive" gives us a nasty look into a future in which social media and consumerism merge to dehumanize and destroy us.
Blue Book Exam: Choose One
Choice A: Develop a thesis that explains how Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (should be online) is an allegory of the moral challenges we face as we are drugged by privilege leaving us indifferent about the sufferings of The Other. Successful essays will connect the allegory to modern day social injustices such as the inhumane working conditions of migrant workers or the incarceration system, to name a couple. You can compare, for example, Le Guin's story to John Oliver's video on child labor in sweat shops.
Choice B: Compare the dehumanization in Black Mirror's "Nosedive" episode with our current obsession with social media as evidenced in Sherry Turkle's "Connected, but Alone?" video or China's social credit score system.
Sherry Turkle's Video Summary
One. We're letting tech take us places we don't want to go.
She's talking about a psychological state, a demonic state, in which we date the angel that turns out to be the devil.
Two. Tech devices change not just what we are but who we are.
Tech is compromising our humanity, our friendships, our ability to enjoy solitude, and our skills at self-reflection.
Three. Crazy, dysfunctional behavior is the new normal.
For example, many text while giving eye contact, a sort of phony connecting.
We text at church, funerals, and sacred places. We take "salvation selfies" as we emerge from the baptism water.
We hang out at Starbucks for five hours and say the next day what a great time we had when in fact we we're "alone together" on our smartphones.
Four. We aspire to the "Goldilocks effect": not too close, not too far.
In other words, we want control of our environment. We prefer control to the messy lack of control from real human interaction.
We no longer want real conversations that take place in real time and that cannot be controlled. Texting becomes the preferred option.
In extreme cases, we're willing to dispense with people and prefer Siri or sociable robots.
Five. We take little sips of tweets and posts and other data bites and the hope is that eventually all these little sips will lead to one big nutritional gulp. But this hope is built on a canard. All we have is nothing.
Six. Our escape from conversation compromises the skills that also help us in self-reflection.
People who converse well also self-reflect well, and the opposite is true.
Seven. We expect more from technology and less from each other.
We need the latest upgrades and refreshes and innovations in tech even as we keep more and more people at a distance.
Eight. We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy.
Intimacy requires honesty, loss of control, and vulnerability, but the rewards are humor, emotional completeness, and life fullness.
We're averse to the demands of friendship, which require commitment, loss of control, and vulnerability.
Nine. We suffer from "alone anxiety."
We can't be at a red light without checking texts and Facebook status.
We connect through texting and other ways not as a sign of our fullness as human beings but from a place of fear, fragmentation, desperation, loneliness, and angst (the restless anxiety that results from not knowing who we are, from having no purpose, and from languishing in the existential vacuum).
Turkle says "connection is a symptom, not a cure" for our sense of loneliness.
The more we connect, the more desperate we become, which in turn compels us to connect even more. This addiction becomes a vicious cycle.
Ten. Turkle says, "I share; therefore I am."
This is a delusion. Sharing is an expression of fragmentation and desperation and the loss of selfhood.
Turkle observes, "We're using people as spare parts to repair our fragile and broken selves."
Eleven. Turkle's secret sauce to the human condition is this: Solitude is the prerequisite for real connection.
"If we can't be alone, we'll be more lonely." We need to learn to be alone, and that means not sharing all the time on social media.
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