Homework #19 for November 20
Read Brendan Foht’s “The Case Against Human Gene Editing” and write an essay that explains why the author maintains his position.
November 13 Homework #17: Read Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” and write a 3-paragraph essay that analyzes Nikolay’s moral disintegration and decrepitude. We will also explore a Guardian essay that critically examines how the story reveals a lot about the deception of happiness.
November 15 Homework #18: Read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” and write a 3-paragraph essay that compares how Dexter Green and Nikolay both traded true happiness and meaning for a life wasted on a chimera.
November 20 Homework #19: Read Brendan Foht’s “The Case Against Human Gene Editing” and write an essay that explains why the author maintains his position.
November 22 Holiday
November 27 Homework #20: Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains the author’s position.
November 29 Homework #21: Read Evan Osnos’ “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” and in 3 paragraphs analyze the causes behind the wealth tech industry’s obsession with preparing for the Apocalypse.
December 4 Homework #22: Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Giving Up on Preventative Care” and in 3 paragraphs support, refute, or complicate her thesis that we should resist the preventive care of America’s medical establishment.
December 6 Homework #23: Read Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains her reasons for arguing that non-theism is morally superior to theism.
December 11 Peer Edit
December 13 Essay #5 Due and Portfolio Part 2, #11-#23
Essay #5 Due 12-13-18: 260 Points(over one-fourth of your total semester grade)
You need minimum 3 sources for your MLA Works Cited page.
Option A
Read Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” the Guardian essay, and “Winter Dreams” and develop a thesis that addresses the claim that happiness is a form of deception that results in a squandered life and moral decrepitude. Consider the false types of happiness we settle for based on denial, willed ignorance, pursuing chimeras, and Pascal's notion of the Imaginary Life.
Blaise Pascal, writing in his Pensees, summed up our incurable vanity that seeks to flatter ourselves with a trumped-up image at the expense of our substance and moral character. He writes:
We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.
Option B
Read Brendan Foht’s “The Case Against Human Gene Editing” and write an essay that supports, refutes, or complicates the claim that gene editing poses moral and political problems that we cannot handle.
Sources:
"Genetically Modified Humans? No Thanks"
More pros and cons from Business Insider
"Building Baby from the Genes Up"
Option C
Read Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” and address the claim that Bloom, trying to sell lots of books, is writing a disingenuous argument, relying more on semantics and trickery than substance, to write a sensationalistic, hyped-up thesis.
Option D
In the context of Evan Osnos’ “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” analyze the causes behind the wealth tech industry’s obsession with preparing for the Apocalypse.
Option E
Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s essay “Giving Up on Preventative Care” and support, refute, or complicate her thesis that we should resist the preventive care of America’s medical establishment.
Option F
Read Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” and defend, refute, or complicate the author’s claim that non-theism is morally superior to theism.
Option G
Watch Hasan Minhaj defend affirmative action in the context of Asian Americans suing Harvard (Netflix Patriotic Act, first episode), and write a research paper that defends, refutes, or complicates Hasan's argument. Consult "The 'Whitening' of Asian Americans" in The Atlantic; "The Rise and Fall of Affirmative Action" in The New Yorker; "The Uncomfortable Truth About Affirmative Action and Asian-Americans" in The New Yorker.
Option H
Watch Hasan Minhaj in Netflix's Patriot Act argue that Amazon's policies present unfair practices to other businesses and the consumer to the degree that they should be subject to antitrust laws. Defend, refute, or complicate Minhaj's position.
Essay Variation 3 "Winter Dreams":
In the context of Pascal's Pensees 147, we can examine Dexter Green's life as someone who embodies the aspiration to achieve the American Dream, which the story masterfully shows to be a necrophilic Trickster that sucks the life out of us the way a drug sucks the life out of an addict.
Another Variation:
Analyze the emptiness of Judy Jones in the context of Kristen Dombek's essay "Emptiness."
Sources:
For your sources, you can use Pascal's Pensees 147, McMahon's blog post on "Winter Dreams," Kristen Dombek's essay "Emptiness," and Laurence Shames' chapter "The Hunger for More." You can also use the PBS Newshour video "The Origin of 'White Trash' and Why Class Is Still an Issue in the US":
Essay Variation #1 for "Winter Dreams":
In the context of Pascal's Pensees 147, we can examine Dexter Green's life as someone who embodies the aspiration to achieve the American Dream, which the story masterfully shows to be a necrophilic Trickster that sucks the life out of us the way a drug sucks the life out of an addict. In other words, you are writing an extended comparison between Dexter's addiction to Judy Jones and a junkie's addiction to heroin. You can use for 3 sources: "Winter Dreams," Pensees 147, and the YouTube Ted Talk video "Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong."
Essay Variation #2 of "Winter Dreams":
Analyze the emptiness of Judy Jones in the context of Kristen Dombek's essay "Emptiness."
Sources:
For your sources, you can use Pascal's Pensees 147, McMahon's blog post on "Winter Dreams," Kristen Dombek's essay "Emptiness," and Laurence Shames' chapter "The Hunger for More." You can also use the PBS Newshour video "The Origin of 'White Trash' and Why Class Is Still an Issue in the US."
Essay Variation #3 for "Winter Dreams": Comparing and Contrasting Dexter Green and Hasan Minhaj
In the context of "Winter Dreams" and Hasan Minhaj's Netflix 72-minute comedy special "Homecoming King," compare and contrast the chimera of social status as a chimera between a white man, Dexter Green, and a self-described member of the "New Brown America," Hasan Minhaj. What special challenges do immigrants of color face as they try to find belonging, acceptance, and social status in America? How do these immigrants struggle to fit in with their American peers and fit their parents' expectations at the same time? How does this conflict add pressure to their quest to find status and belonging in America?
Key Points You Might Address
One. Hasan struggles with American freedom and his father's strict authoritarian control.
Two. Hasan and Dexter share the freedom to dream and enjoy "the audacity of equality."
Three. Hasan must find belonging in a country that smears him with racial stereotypes. In contrast, Dexter's whiteness makes it easier for him to join "the club."
Four. Has finds connection and belonging with his fellow Americans through popular culture. So does Dexter.
Five. Both Dexter and Hasan have a chip on their shoulder. At one point, Hasan seeks revenge on someone who he feels betrayed him and must learn a valuable lesson.
Six. Dexter and Hasan both have a white privilege chimera: Dexter is obsessed with Judy Jones; Hasan is obsessed with Bethany Reed. "You Are My White Princess" would be a good essay title.
Seven. Dexter's story is horrible and full of despair with no redemption. In contrast, Hasan's story is hopeful and full of redemption.
Sources
For your sources, you can use "Winter Dreams," the Netflix special "Homecoming King," the New Yorker article, and the AV/TV Club article.
Study Questions for "Winter Dreams"
One. How does the story introduce social class anxieties into Dexter’s personality?
America is supposed to be a democracy, a country where "everyone is equal," but this is empty rhetorical cant (hypocritical and sanctimonious talk). In truth, Americans have always been obsessed with social class. Upon America's founding, America has used slave labor to get the hard work done. In Nancy Isenberg's book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America, she writes about America's class hierarchy using "lower classes" to do dirty work. Americans abhor the thought of being in the underclass and are obsessed with class status.
Today, we can see social class status at play at restaurants that require valet parking. The shiny silver Mercedes is parked right in front of the restaurant while the 20-year-old rusted clunker is parked several blocks away behind a decrepit liquor store.
Dexter Green's Class Anxiety
Dexter Green grows up haunted by the idea that he is perceived as lower class, a mere caddie or grocery store clerk.
We see in the story that Dexter’s dad is “second best,” the owner of a second best grocery store, evidencing working class roots.
Dexter works as a caddie, a servant to the upper classes, and he finds this humiliating.
He reads the bleak weather as an omen of his doom while living in the underclass, working as a servile caddy for professional players and tastemakers, people who matter.
He feels irrelevant and irrelevance stirs resentment and depression in his veins. Americans want to feel like they are on center stage.
Dexter sees life as extremes, those who have and those who have not; the dreary Northern spring and the gorgeous fall.
All or Nothing Universe of Perpetual Adolescent
He creates this false binary universe: We call this the All or Nothing Fallacy. Judy Jones has become a symbol of "making it in America," being the object of everyone's envy. In this sense, Judy Jones is the embodiment of "winter dreams," the phony, superficial class status or "Chanel No. 5" moment that feeds the souls of so many American souls who sacrifice their whole lives to prop up this tinsel image.
Dexter's Psychological Principle:
The dominant drive of Dexter is to acquire his winter dreams by being rich and having Judy Jones, the ultimate trophy. Seeing people envy him is the drug that diminishes his class anxiety.
He is a man with a chip on his shoulder who needs class supremacy over others, or so he believes, to be happy.
We read that after the depression of spring, October brings him hope and November brings him “ecstatic triumph.”
We see Dexter’s vaulting ambition to get away from the lowly caddy job. He’s “too old” for it, he thinks, at 14.
Two. What compelled Dexter to hurry away from his caddy job?
An 11-year-old girl, Miss Jones, described as “beautifully ugly” and “who are destined after a few years to be inexpressibly lovely and bring no end of misery to a great number of men.”
Indeed, beauty can unhinge men and dislocate men from reality, as we shall see in the story.
But not just beauty—beauty combined with the aura of upper class money: This is the noxious cocktail that will undermine Dexter Green.
Projection, Not Love
We must emphasize Dexter is not in love with Judy Jones the person, but he image of his own projection. Too often "falling in love" is a person projecting his inner needs and fantasies so as to worship an abstraction or idea but to be blind to the person he presumes he's in love with. In truth, Dexter's objectifying Judy Jones makes her more of a thing than a person.
Dexter Unhinged by Beauty as a Symbol of Old Money and Privilege
The girl addressed Dexter as “boy,” a sign of his lowly servitude, and this has an emasculating effect on him.
His sense of emasculating is further reinforced when the caddy-master shows up and says to Dexter, “What you standing there like a dummy for? Go pick up the young lady’s clubs.”
He quits from compulsion: “The enormity of his decision frightened him. He was a favorite caddy, and the thirty dollars a month he earned through the summer were not to be made elsewhere around the lake. But he had received a strong emotional shock, and his perturbation required a violent and immediate outlet.”
His perturbation is the great anxiety that makes him compulsive and unhinges him. He’s high-strung and compulsive.
We read a warning of his compulsive nature: “As so frequently would be the case in the future, Dexter was unconsciously dictated by his winter dreams.”
Three. We read a famous passage: "But do not get the impression, because his winter dreams happened to be concerned at first with musings on the rich, that there was anything shoddy in the boy. He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people -- he wanted the glittering things themselves.” What does this passage mean?
Dexter believes he can, through hard work, embody “glitter,” that is to say the apotheosis of success. America is not a country; it’s a dream. America is “Winter Dreams,” the idea that we find personal fulfillment, meaning, and higher purpose through the attainment of “glitter.” It is this very sick idolatry that will undermine Dexter Green.
We also read that while he become successful in business, he suffered certain “denials,” and that the story is about one of those denials, and that would be the denial of acquiring Judy Jones, who for Dexter is the highest example (apotheosis) of “glitter,” of Dexter’s “Winter Dreams.”
The Draw of Glitter
Everyone wants to live on the coast. Fly over the landlocked region of USA and you'll see large stretches of uninhabited land full of wheat, corn, and cow.
Between Los Angeles and San Francisco is California's sparsely populated central valley with its smells of hay, alfalfa, soybeans, cow dung, and crushed dreams.
Four. As we read about Dexter’s rise in the laundry industry and the rich patrons who frequent his establishments, we learn what about old and new money?
Old money has a certain aura, a certain “heritage,” and a snobbery attached to it. On the other hand, new money, the rags to riches story such as Dexter’s, has humble beginnings and class insecurity attached to it even as the person of new wealth amasses riches because in part he will always feel a bit like a fish out of water and he will always have memories of his poor beginnings. Moreover, he may not know all the codes and linguistic tics that the old rich use in their arsenal of being smugly rich. He may have some of his old caddy behaviors, which he thinks about when he returns to play golf at his old course—not as a caddy but as a man who’s “made it.”
We can surmise perhaps that Dexter is not just desperate to be rich but is desperate to have an identity of being rich, of not being looked down upon by those with old money, and his delusion is that winning the affections of old-money Judy Jones with all her intoxicating beauty is his ticket to happiness.
Old Money Vs. Nouveau Riche
Old Money has cachet and is considered superior to nouveau riche, also called arrivestes, parvenus, and vulgarian small potatoes.
But much of his quest is in his own imagination. Therefore, his quest is an illusion or a chimera, and it is this chimera that will unhinge him.
Five. One of the brilliant things in this story is the way Fitzgerald quickly exposes Judy Jones’ personality at the golf course where she hits a golf ball into Mr. T.A. Hedrick’s abdomen. What do we learn about her in such a brief passage?
Judy Jones is self-centered, entitled, and used to not being accountable for anything. In other words, she is somewhat of a cipher and wastrel. She makes messes and expects others to clean them up. She can hurt others, but feel no empathy for her actions. In other words, she’s an empty-headed, repellant narcissist.
And here lies the story’s tragedy: Dexter Green has hinged is whole notion of happiness on going on a Love Quest for Judy Jones, a Narcissistic Cipher. His “winter dreams” are futile, delusional, and empty. They will bring him nothing but a handful of ashes and dust.
Another important observation from this scene is that Dexter watches the old-money golf players gawk and admire Judy Jones’ beauty, doing so with a certain misogyny and lasciviousness.
Their remarks make her all the more a compelling “trophy.” Dexter is diseased by the need to create an image through the amassing of trophies, what in Latin is called the libido ostentando. Dexter’s lust for ostentatiousness will blind him from the fundamental emptiness that defines his existence.
Six. After seeing the adult beauty Judy Jones at the golf course, Dexter goes on a night swim and hears piano that he associates with the correct life path he has taken: “The sound of the tune precipitated in him a sort of ecstasy and it was with that ecstasy he viewed what was happening to him now. It was a mood of intense appreciation, a sense that, for once, he was magnificently attuned to life and that everything about him was radiating a brightness and a glamour he might never know again.”
How does the above passage speak to The Trickster as part of Dexter’s Quest to find his Winter Dreams?
“Winter Dreams” is essentially a chimera story: A man quests for his chimera and is crushed by the emptiness of his dream. Therefore, a chimera can be called a Trickster. A Trickster is a character or an idea that carries us through the four levels of emotion: earthly, angelic, mystical, and demonic.
The Trickster must give us hope and promise of finding a land of milk and honey only to throw us down from the heavens and into the inferno of our own making.
Seven. In Part III, how do we see Dexter as a committed student of social class?
While Dexter asserts his superiority over the old-money rich due to his hard work ethic, he wants his children to grow up as old money, and Dexter wants to learn the codes of old money: casual dress, facial expressions (hauteur and superciliousness), and all the consumer secrets the old rich enjoy. The rich have a secret code of conduct that sets them apart from the rest, and Dexter wants to be an expert on this code.
Dexter must “keep to the set patterns” so that his peasant background will never be revealed and thus bring shame to him and his future family.
Further, he lies about his origins, tells the rich he’s from Keeble, not the working-class Black Bear Village.
Eight. Even though Judy Jones is a flirt and a shallow coquette, she inadvertently asks Dexter an existential question during their first dinner: “Who are you, anyhow?” How does her question touch on one of the story’s major themes?
As an American, Dexter believes he can re-invent himself anyway he wants. He is a chameleon, and he is free to dream himself into the kind of person he wants to be. The idea that we can become our dream is uniquely American.
The irony is that in many ways he doesn’t know who he is since his energies have created a façade to others and to himself.
In fact, his answer to Judy’s question is unwittingly true. He says, “I’m nobody. . . . My career is largely a matter of futures.” In fact, he only lives in the future, not the present, and this is part of his unhinged character: to be disconnected and disengaged from the present as he looks to the future when he will finally be worthy of achieving the American Dream. But he will never be worthy. His hope is a chimera that pushes him to constantly look ahead into the future and never in the present moment.
When he assures Judy he is not poor and she kisses him, her kisses arouse a “surfeit that would demand more surfeit.” In other words, his desires will always outrun his capacity to fulfill them, and Judy Jones is the embodiment of his excess desires or concupiscence.
What we have, then, is a mutually self-destructive symbiosis or interdependence. What’s scary is that that unhealthy symbiosis is the very foundation of Dexter’s “Winter Dreams.”
Nine. Much of the story chronicles Dexter’s addiction to Judy Jones like a junkie hooked on drugs. Explain.
We read, “Dexter surrendered himself to the most direct and unprincipled personality with which he had ever come into contact.”
The unhinged man is so needy and compulsive that he surrenders his self-interest to an unethical, morally bankrupt force in the name of his carnal and monetary idolatry.
He has no moral combat to save him from pursuing someone as unprincipled as Judy Jones.
We can further explore Dexter’s unhinging with Judy Jones by looking at her as a drug. She is less human to Dexter and more of a substance of his addiction. And in turn Judy Jones is addicted to the power she has over men by her power to intoxicate them. She in turn is addicted to seeing men addicted to her.
We see that Dexter is no needy for Judy Jones that he sacrifices his dignity and self-respect to pursue her. For example, he knows she loves other men in her shallow capricious way and that she sometimes “loves” in the same pathetic, superficial manner, and she even tells him so, but rather than be upset he accepts her imperfect, disloyal love. We read, for example, that after telling him that she was in love with another man earlier the same day as they lie in bed, he finds her words “beautiful and romantic.”
When she lies to him and says she did not kiss a man earlier the same day, Dexter knows she’s lying, but he’s okay with that because he is “glad that she has taken the time to lie to him.”
Because Judy Jones is aware that he has no standards of behavior that she must adhere to, she knows she can get away with anything. Deep down, she can’t love him because he lacks self-respect, but she herself lacks self-respect because if she had it, she would not be in a relationship with someone she doesn’t respect. Both of them are degraded in the relationship, a fact that neither wants to see. Both are unhinged in this manner.
As you read the story, you will see that the narrative has many parallels with drug addiction as it pertains to Dexter Green’s relationship with Judy Jones.
Over and over again, we see that Judy Jones, the consummate Trickster, sends Dexter into hell through neglect and infidelity, but then gives him just enough honey so he’ll come back to her. She does this to many men, not just Dexter. We read, “Whenever one showed signs of dropping out through long neglect, she granted him a brief honeyed hour, which encouraged him to tag along for a year or so longer.”
She is clearly a sick person and the men who become addicted to her are just as sickly. They live in a demimonde of no-respect and emptiness.
Like a drug addict, Dexter becomes unhinged and cannot be civil to others when she unexpectedly disappears at a social event. He panics and is overcome with anxiety that causes him to lose his polite facade.
We read that Judy Jones is not a self-possessed person in her compulsion to torture men: “Judy made these forays upon the helpless and defeated without malice, indeed half unconscious that there was anything mischievous in anything that she did.”
Even the “strong and the brilliant, “play her game and not their own.” She always has the upper hand.
Her beauty is her power, but as we shall see, using beauty for power and identity is a sure failure because beauty is transitory.
For example, I know a man who used to look like Paul McCartney, but as this celebrity wannabe aged, his face bloated and his distorted features no longer gave him the cachet he enjoyed in his youth. He now lives in his mother’s basement where he traipses around in a robe and eats Hot Pockets while trolling on the Internet.
But while her beauty is in its prime, she is Dexter’s drug, as we read: “The helpless ecstasy of losing himself with in her was opiate rather than tonic.”
When you think about the above line, many of us love the drama of a tormented obsession, and we therefore choose to stay entrapped in our torment because to lose that drama would force us to face the abyss or the existential vacuum that defines our empty existence.
In many ways, the story teaches us that we are our own worst enemy. Sadly, many of us “unhinge” ourselves from reality for lack of anything better to do.
Another way of looking at Dexter’s “Winter Dreams” is that he was feeding off the sick energy of desperation that Judy Jones created between her and her bevy of lovers.
Dexter knows he’s an addict, at least on an unconscious level. This makes him a divided soul: Part of him wants to escape his addiction to Judy Jones. He even gets engaged to another woman as a hopeful “cure” for his disease. Imagine getting engaged to someone you don’t love as a “cure” for a love addiction. That is a cogent sign of being unhinged.
His Judy Jones substitute is Irene Scheerer. Unlike Judy Jones who is described as a refined beauty, we read little of Irene’s physical charms except that she is “a little stout.”
We have to wonder if the world is full of Judy Jones archetypes that enchant men, leave them, and damage the men so that they can never love other women because these damaged men are forever fixated on their own personal “Judy Jones.” Perhaps we can call this the Angelina Jolie Factor: One look into her eyes and you’re permanently damaged, unhinged, and ready to abandon reality as you know it.
Even as he tries to love Irene, he keeps thinking about the manner in which Judy Jones beckons, torments, and insults him, and he is desperate to convince himself that he cannot pursue Judy Jones any longer. But as an unhinged man, as a man possessed by the IDEA of what Judy Jones represents—complete power, ecstasy, and abandonment—he finds his drug addiction incurable, and as such he hates himself and he hates Judy Jones—the very woman he cannot free himself from.
At night, he argues with himself about Judy Jones, going over a laundry list as to why she’d be a horrible wife. But that is the cortex in his brain. The limbic part of his brain, where emotion and reptilian desire reside, continue to rage a protest for acquiring Judy Jones.
He sees Judy Jones at a dance and he realizes that he had long ago been “hardened against jealousy.” He still wants her. He’s twenty-five, he has devoted 14 years to obsessing over Judy Jones, and he is about to marry Irene Scheerer.
About to get married to Irene, he still obsesses over Judy Jones, wondering if she still cares about him, and Irene is nothing but a backdrop to his life, “no more than a curtain spread behind him.” She will be part of a marital façade, but his demonic possession will still rage on.
Part 2:
The Narcissistic Character of Dexter Green:
Dexter Green is empty; he has no self. He only has an idea of what the successful self looks like to others, what Kristin Dombek in her essay "Emptiness" calls "selfiness."
Dexter imitates an image of success at the expense of others whom he uses in the service of his grand performance.
Empty, loveless, and without any real connection to other human beings, Dexter focuses on all he knows: creating a "hologram of the superpowered self" or what elsewhere Dombek calls the "simulacrum of the superpowered self."
In other words, Dexter doesn't work on building a real life for himself. Rather, he becomes a curator of his fake life, which becomes a "reality" to himself and others. In doing this, he fulfills Pascal's insight that most people hate their real life but prefer to create an imaginary life for themselves and for others.
For Dexter Green, people are not people. They are tools to help him hone and chisel his successful image.
As a narcissist, Dexter disregards content, substance, morality, and integrity. He only worships one thing: the "hologram" of the Super Self. That is his "winter dream." He is smart enough to know that the "winter dream" is a destructive illusion, but he does not care, but he has invested too much of his life in this "winter dream" and this dream is all he knows.
Nothing embodies this "winter dream," this "hologram" of superior success, more than Judy Jones. The tragedy and farce of the story is that Judy Jones is a mediocrity, a cipher, a hoax, a complete illusion.
Dexter Green "gets played" by the very illusion that he worships above all else.
Essay Variation 3 "Winter Dreams":
In the context of Pascal's Pensees 147, we can examine Dexter Green's life as someone who embodies the aspiration to achieve the American Dream, which the story masterfully shows to be a necrophilic Trickster that sucks the life out of us the way a drug sucks the life out of an addict.
Sources:
For your sources, you can use Pascal's Pensees 147, McMahon's blog post on "Winter Dreams," and Laurence Shames' chapter "The Hunger for More." You can also use the PBS Newshour video "The Origin of 'White Trash' and Why Class Is Still an Issue in the US."
Sample Thesis Statements
"Winter Dreams" is a cautionary tale about a shallow narcissist whose relationship to Judy Jones is analogous to that of a junkie and the heroin.
"Winter Dreams" is a Faustian Bargain tale about a man who sells his soul to the devil for unexamined ambition, a bargain that dehumanizes him like a junkie hooked on crack.
"Winter Dreams" is a fable about how class status anxiety can overtake us and compromise our humanity through blind ambition, using other people as trophies, and trading real life for a false representation of life.
Dexter Green, like the citizens of Omelas, makes a devil's bargain that results in the death of their souls evidenced by _______________, _______________, _________________, and ______________________.
Dexter Green of "Winter Dreams" and Nikolai of "Gooseberries" are so blinded by their ambition that they become solipsists, withdrawing into their self and disconnected from reality evidenced by ________________, _________________, _______________, and _________________________.
Dexter Green's obsession with Judy Jones as the winter dream of social status becomes his cocaine, which diminishes him into a junkie evidenced by _________________, __________________, _______________, and ____________________.
Some might assert that while it is tempting to condemn Dexter Green and Nikolai for their twisted dreams, it is in fact their dreams that save them from idleness, sloth, and stagnation. But this defense is misguided when we consider _____________, __________________, ____________________, and _____________________.
"Winter Dreams" is a masterful story that contradicts the myth that would have us believe America is a place that celebrates equality for all. In fact, the story and its main character Dexter Jones makes the compelling case that America hard-wires many of us to equate happiness and success with social status dominance evidenced by _______________, _______________, _______________, and ________________.
Judy Jones, the cipher featured in "Winter Dreams," is a hollow vessel of evil as described in Kristen Dombek's essay "Emptiness" evidenced by _______________, ___________________, _____________________, and ____________________.
LAURENCE SHAMES
The More Factor
Americans have always been optimists, and optimists have always liked to speculate. In Texas
in the 1880s, the speculative instrument of choice was towns, and there is no tale more
American than this. What people would do was buy up enormous tracts of parched and vacant
land, lay out a Main Street, nail together some wooden sidewalks, and start slapping up
buildings. One of these buildings would be called the Grand Hotel and would have a saloon
complete with swinging doors. Another might be dubbed the New Academy or the Opera
House. The developers would erect a flagpole and name a church, and once the workmen had
packed up and moved on, the towns would be as empty as the sky.
But no matter. The speculators, next, would hire people to pass out handbills in the Eastern
and Midwestern cities, tracts limning the advantages of relocation to "the Athens of the
South" or "the new plains Jerusalem." When persuasion failed, the builders might resort to
bribery, paying people's moving costs and giving them houses, in exchange for nothing but a
pledge to stay until a certain census was taken or a certain inspection made. Once the nose
count was completed, people were free to move on, and there was in fact a contingent of
folks who made their living by keeping a cabin on skids and dragging it for pay from one
town to another. The speculators' idea, of course, was to lure the railroad. If one could create
a convincing semblance of a town, the railroad might come through it, and a real town would
develop, making the speculators staggeringly rich. By these devices a man named Sanborn
once owned Amarillo. But railroad tracks are narrow and the state of Texas is very,very
wide. For every Wichita Falls or Lubbock there were a dozen College Mounds or
Belchervilles, 2 bleached, unpeopled burgs that receded quietly into the dust, taking with them
large amounts of speculators' money. Still, the speculators kept right on bucking the odds and
depositing empty towns in the middle of nowhere.
Why did they do it? Two reasons--reasons that might be said to summarize the central fact
of American economic history and that go a fair way toward explaining what is perhaps the
central strand of the national character. The first reason was simply that the possible returns
were so enormous as to partake of the surreal, to create a climate in which ordinary logic and
prudence did not seem to apply. In a boom like that of real estate when the railroad barreled
through, long shots that might pay one hundred thousand to one seemed worth a bet. The
second reason, more pertinent here, is that there was a presumption that America would keep
on booming--if not forever, then at least longer than it made sense to worry about. There
would always be another gold rush, another Homestead Act, another oil strike. The next
generation would always ferret out opportunities that would be still more lavish than any that
had gone before. America was those opportunities. This was an article not just of faith, but of
strategy. You banked on the next windfall, you staked your hopes and even your self-esteem
on it, and this led to a national turn of mind that might usefully be thought of as the habit of
more.
A century, maybe two centuries, before anyone had heard the term baby boomer, much
less yuppie, the habit of more had been installed as the operative truth among the
economically ambitious. The habit of more seemed to suggest that there was no such thing as
getting wiped out in America. A fortune lost in Texas might be recouped in Colorado. Funds
frittered away on grazing land where nothing grew might flood back in as silver. There was
always a second chance, or always seemed to be, in this land where growth was destiny and
where expansion and purpose were the same.The key was the frontier, not just as a matter of
acreage, but as idea. Vast, varied, rough as rocks, America was the place where one never
quite came to the end. Ben Franklin explained it to Europe even before the Revolutionary
War had finished: America offered new chances to those "who, in their own Countries, where
all the Lands [were] fully occupied . . . could never [emerge] from the poor Condition
wherein they were born."3
So central was this awareness of vacant space and its link to economic promise that
Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian who set the tone for much of the twentieth century's
understanding of the American past, would write that it was "not the constitution, but free
land . . . [that] made the democratic type of society in America."4 good laws mattered; an
accountable government mattered; ingenuity and hard work mattered. But those things were,
so to speak, an overlay on the natural geographic America that was simply there, and whose
vast and beckoning possibilities seemed to generate the ambition and the sometimes reckless
liberty that would fill it. First and foremost, it was open space that provided "the freedom of
the individual to rise under conditions of social mobility."5 Open space generated not just
ambition, but metaphor. As early as 1835, Tocqueville was extrapolating from the fact of
America's emptiness to the observation that "no natural boundary seems to be set to the
efforts of man."6 Nor was any limit placed on what he might accomplish, since, in that
heyday of the Protestant ethic, a person's rewards were taken to be quite strictly proportionate
to his labors. Frontier; opportunity; more.
This has been the American trinity from the very start. The frontier was the backdrop and
also the raw material for the streak of economic booms. The booms
became the goad and also the justification for the myriad gambles and for Americans' famous
optimism. The optimism, in turn, shaped the schemes and visions that were sometimes noble,
sometimes appalling, always bold. The frontier, as reality and as symbol, is what has shaped
the American way of doing things and the American sense of what's worth doing. But there
has been one further corollary to the legacy of the frontier, with its promise of ever-expanding
opportunities: given that the goal-- a realistic goal for most of our history--was more,
Americans have been somewhat backward in adopting values, hopes, ambitions that have to
do with things other than more. In America, a sense of quality has lagged far behind a sense
of scale. An ideal of contentment has yet to take root in soil traditionally more hospitable to
an ideal of restless striving. The ethic of decency has been upstaged by the ethic of success.
The concept of growth has been applied almost exclusively to things that can be measured,
counted, weighed. And the hunger for those things that are unmeasurable but fine--the sorts of
accomplishment that cannot be undone by circumstance or a shift in social fashion, the kind
of serenity that cannot be shattered by tomorrow's headline--has gone largely unfulfilled, and
even unacknowledged. If the supply of more went on forever, perhaps that wouldn't matter
very much. Expansion could remain a goal unto itself, and would continue to generate a value
system based on bulk rather than on nuance, on quantities of money rather than on quality of
life, on "progress" itself rather than on a sense of what the progress was for. But what if, over
time, there was less more to be had? That is the essential situation of America today.
Let's keep things in proportion: the country is not running out of wealth, drive, savvy, or
opportunities. We are not facing imminent ruin, and neither panic nor gloom is called for. But
there have been ample indications over the past two decades that we are running out of more.
Consider productivity growth--according to many economists, the single most telling and least
distortable gauge of changes in real wealth. From 1947 to 1965, productivity in the private
sector (adjusted, as are all the following figures, for inflation) was advancing, on average, by
an annual 3.3 percent. This means, simply, that each hour of work performed by a specimen
American worker contributed 3.3 cents worth of more to every American dollar every year;
whether we saved it or spent it, that increment went into a national kitty of ever-enlarging
aggregate wealth. Between 1965 and 1972, however, the "more-factor" decreased to 2.4
percent a year, and from 1972 to 1977 it slipped further, to 1.6 percent. By the early 1980s,
productivity growth was at a virtual standstill, crawling along at 0.2 percent for the five years
ending in 1982.7 Through the middle years of the 1980s, the numbers rebounded
somewhat--but by then the gains were being neutralized by the gargantuan carrying costs on
the national debt.8
3. Benjamin Franklin, "Information to Those Who Would Remove to America," in The
Autobiography and
Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 242.
4. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (Melbourne, Fla.: Krieger,
1976
[reprint of
1920 edition]), 293.
5. Ibid., 266.
6. Tocqueville, Democracy in America.
7. These figures are taken from the Council of Economic Advisers, Economic Report of
the
President, February
1984, 267.
8. For a lucid and readable account of the meaning and implications of our reservoir of red
ink, see Lawrence Malkin, The National Debt (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1987).
Through no fault of Malkin's, many of his numbers are already obsolete, but his explanation
of who owes what to whom, and what it means, remains sound and even entertaining in a
bleak sort of way.
Sample Introduction That Transitions to a Thesis
In the age of social media, we curate our own lives. A curator is a guide who controls the message. He is the custodian of his own self-image. Indeed, in the age of social media we curate our own lives, often emphasizing that which makes us look successful and desirable and concealing that which puts us in a less flattering light. The danger of being our own curator is that we begin to believe in our own BS. For the last two decades, I’ve curated myself as an intellectual, one who passionately engages in my three loves, reading, writing, and piano playing, but I’ve recently had an awakening in which I realized that thousands of hours lazily spent on the Internet have compromised my intellectual life rendering me somewhat of a fraud to others and myself. My awakening is partly the result of four books: So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work by Cal Newport, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, and Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter. I am not alone in realizing I’ve squandered thousands of hours engaging in mindless clicking before an Internet screen. My friend, who is far more brilliant than I am, described his wasted existence in the following email:
Like you, I got lost and wasted tens of thousands of hours on the internet. I'm wondering when I reached my 10,000 hours of internet mastery? If I started regular use around 1995, and I averaged at least a few hours a day (which increased over the years to a current and embarrassing 8+/day...my job allows me to spend half or so of the eight-hour shift on the internet, then I'm on a few hours at night), I'm guessing I achieved Internet Mastery by about 2000 or so. I've probably logged 50,000 hours or so by now...which means I could have mastered five different art forms by now. What a tragic waste.
My friend and I both agreed that we’re going to drastically cut down our Internet use and devote ourselves to “deep work,” defined by Cal Newport as prolonged periods of mental discomfort resulting from giving singular concentration to one’s craft. We can only make this change because our self-curated image as “intellectuals” has proven to be a false one in the face of our wasted Internet time. Hopefully, we will change and no longer be curators of a lie.
Sadly, the Great Curator of BS Himself, Dexter Green from "Winter Dreams," is doomed to a life of stagnation and moral decrepitude because he embodies the recalcitrant characteristics of a narcissist evidenced by __________________________, ______________________________, ___________________________, and ____________________________________.
We All Have to Be Mindful Our Addictions
Controversy of a Famous Story: The Wolf You Feed
It's so ironic that new agers who say "be mindful" as they pass on the wolf story are being mindless and not doing any research on a story that may have become a cheap cliche. Nevertheless, the wolf story resonates with us because it appears to have a lot of psychological truth.
Cherokee Indians have a fable that explains the nature of addiction.
Here is the same story on what appears to be a "self-help" website.
The same story is told in the context of ethnic, cultural, and spiritual appropriation with the explanation that Billy Graham modified the story for his Christian preaching.
Another blog makes the same claim that the Wolf Story is a form of white colonialism.
Another blog explores the story's questionable origins.
Another blog dismisses the story as a fraud with no American Indian origins; rather, it is a fabrication of Billy Graham. Why would a white preacher turn it into an "American Indian" fable?
Here's another blog that claims to have the real story, not the colonized one.
Confusing the Matter:
Turns out that yet other people claim the story is truly of authentic Cherokee origin, yet it has been perverted to fit a Christian scheme of good and evil when in fact the story is more complicated.
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