What We’ve Done and Why It Matters

Since we’re about two quarters deep in this course, it’s hard not to think ahead as far as what’s next to come. The general consensus about spring quarter is mostly worry, at least from where I’m standing. The research paper is a little daunting, all kidding aside, but as far as what we’ve done to prepare for that, I don’t feel like we’re going to be all that lost. The UCI library’s website (now that I know how to use it) is gold. Writing papers on things like a movie and an image wasn’t all that painful (seeing as how they had nothing to do with The Prince). As far as finding sources for our claims and the like, I feel like now, at the end of this quarter, I can dig up some decent sources, regardless of the topic. Had I been asked to do that prior to this quarter, It’d be a mess of a paper.

But speaking of topics, uploading blog posts on here, has definitely helped as far as getting the ball rolling for that research paper. Sitting in lecture and listening to big ideas and not just about the literature, but on both the historical and political aspects, really gets you thinking. I’ve actually caught an interest in Argentina’s dirty war, since Professor Lazo first brought it to our attention. I’d probably would be most content with writing about something that we, as a society, country, or even a nation have done, that probably could have been handled better, and maybe compare that to where we are today. Argentina, or the fact that Birth of a Nation is in the Library of Congress Archive, could branch out of that. But I’m still entertaining the ideas. Nothing set in stone quite, yet.

Like my posts from this and even last quarter have shown, there are chunks of our historical past and even present that could have and still can be handled in a better way. While I may not offer solutions, I figure awareness is the start and hopefully an informed opinion is what follows. Harlan Ellison was quoted, “We are not entitled to our opinions. We are entitled to our informed opinions.” What we’ve done in the past, paves the way for what we do now and what we’ll do in the future. Hopefully we’ll all have the informed opinions of the social injustices, of war, of torture as entertainment and the like, to make the right decisions where they count.

Until next quarter!

How Good are the Good Guys?

There is no question that we’ve become desensitized to violence in media. And when I say we, I mean this generation and that to follow. We see the bad guy shot to death, or the good guy on the verge of death after having been repeatedly beaten in the face. We see the innocent woman hit by her husband. We see the gun man shoot up a household. We see war movies where the soldier shoots a child, or strikes a Nazi until he stops moving, or flinging a spear through someone’s chest, or someone strangling someone with a pillow case until they stop struggling.

Most of this is in the media, be it in a movie, a television series or YouTube. It makes no difference. It is accessible. Easily find-able. In the movies we watch and videos we search. It is a cultural norm.

It is fake. We know it is. What’s the big deal?

In December of 2006, news stations released visceral videos of the hanging of Saddam Hussein. As a result a 10 year old boy in Texas hung himself from his bunk bed. His uncle went on the claim that, “he didn’t think it was real” (Zeller).

A twelve year old boy in Turkey also hung himself from his bed. His father remembering that he asked questions like, “How did Saddam die? Did he suffer?” before he killed himself (Zeller).

Now, I know what you’re thinking. At least I hope this is what you’re thinking. Those are real images and video of a real person. They shouldn’t have been released at all. I agree. But had it been a clip in a movie shown on the news would the young boys have known the difference?

I remember in high school I watched a released documentary on the Second World War with my history class. It showed intense images of dead and lifeless flung out on a battle field or a recording of the aftermath of a battle.

Nothing I hadn’t seen before. Movies I had seen before were more gruesome and in color. Hell, I’d seen the bloody details of James Franco cutting off his own arm in 127 Hours. This was nothing. This was no big deal. Only it should have been.

Every student in that high school class room of mine was watching the documentary like any other movie. It should have been hard to watch. We shouldn’t have had that much tolerance for it. Those were real people. They weren’t actors that get to get up and ask for another take on the scene.

There is no question that violence has been desensitized to us. I’m not arguing with that and in all honestly, the way things are going, these things are just going to get easier and easier to access for younger and younger children who don’t yet know the difference between what is real and what isn’t.

Now, torture.  Torture as entertainment is constantly in TV series with detectives and the like.  There is “enhanced interrogations” or “special methods to questionings”

Here. Here is where there should be a stop.

If we weren’t going to stop at the blinking stop signs of young boys hanging themselves from their bunk beds as a result of violence on TV, then here should be it. When we portray the “good guy” in a TV Series, the cop, or Liam Neeson in Taken just looking for his daughter, as the doer of evil, we’re teaching horrid, horrid things.

Torture. Pulling out finger nails, shocking someone with electricity to get answers is always wrong. There are no exceptions. Once you get a young person to think, “Oh well in that situation, it is OK. He is the good guy. He means well. It’s for the greater good,” we’re psychologically screwing up our own youth, here.

Elaine Scarry’s article denotes that there is no ticking time bomb situation. It doesn’t exist. It is never OK. Don’t let our youth identify with the torturer, the doer of evil, the murderer.

For the most part we’d all agree that our children are good people. They’re the good guys, but does your child idolize the bad ass in the movies that does what he “needs to do.” Would you think your child could be capable of that?

Work Cited

Scarry, Elaine. Three Simultaneous Phenomena in the Structure of Torture. Humanities Core Course Guide and Reader: War: 2013-2014: A Custom Edition. By Carol Burke and Larisa Castillo. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 114-21. Print.

Zeller, Tom, Jr. “Saddam Video Is Blamed for Deaths of More Children.” The Lede Saddam Video Is Blamed for Deaths of More Children Comments. The New York Times, 15 Jan. 2007. Web. 26 Feb. 2015.

How Patriotic Can You Be?

Do you ever think about how fortunate you are to have been born or at least living (for the time being) in the USA? That must sound awfully patriotic of me. Actually where I’m going with this is quite far from what you would think. I can’t say that I’m proud to be an American, without expressing the caveats. Whenever I get the thought that I’m so lucky to have been born here, my thoughts always travel back around to how crude, bully-like and overbearing we must seem to the rest of the world. We aren’t this saint-like country.

In Fredrick Douglass’s What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? speech he has a line that I think is quite sad, but I’m in no way disagreeing with it. He exclaims, “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of the US at this very hour.” Now, yes, he is speaking to a US that has yet to ratify the buying, selling and using of other human beings, but in all honesty that makes me even more uneasy. Douglass is comfortable saying this even well before we drop not one, but two atomic bombs on another nation, murdering thousands of innocent people. He didn’t live to see the Japanese Internment Camps, or what we did as a result of the attacks on September 11^th, and now that we’ve gotten into it, the torture our CIA is guilty of.

We’ve been focusing on torture in lecture with Professor Lazo and in the readings we’ve been assigned, but I can’t help but think about the big picture. In light of the CIA torture reports being released it just adds to this list of horrible things the US must be infamous for. Sure we’ve made strides, but these CIA torture reports are so recent. We still have troops in Afghanistan and there have been world-wide protests for our infamous police brutality reports. These bully-like tendencies (putting it mildly) are not just in the past. They are happening now.

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/yy950c/howard-zinn

I’ve put up a hyperlink of  a video of little comedic interview with the author of the book A People’s History of the United States, which could be worth your next seven minutes. The book is about America’s shameful past and in his interview Howard Zinn, the author, makes note that we’ve got some issues even today and even with how we’ve seen the past.

Work Cited

Douglass, Fredrick. “What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?” Independence Day Speech.    Rochester. 4 July 1852. Speech.

“Howard Zinn.” – The Daily Show. N.p., 06 Jan. 2005. Web. 06 Feb. 2015.

“Top 10 Shameful Events in American History – Listverse.” Listverse. N.p., 10 Apr. 2011.    Web. 06 Feb. 2015.

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-2001. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Missing the Rupture?

As we learn about the Civil War and how, as Professor Fahs says, the war was illustrated as it occurred, I wonder if all of you are picking up the connections (or lack thereof) with some of the wars, or rather, the conflicts that we are in today. So jumping right into it, we’ve been learning in lecture that the Civil War proved itself to be a “crisis of meaning” to many artists, writers and painters alike, which makes sense if you ask me. It was a consuming war. But I do have a bone to pick with quite a bit of the photography of the aftermath of some battles.

I was actually surprised to learn that well known photographers of the Civil War, like Alexander Gardner, were staging their subjects (casualties) so that they would get the shot that they saw fit. I don’t know how that makes you feel, but personally that news made me a little uneasy. For one, let’s point out that photography was supposedly known to be the truth to the war, “rupturing” those paintings and drawings of romanticized battles and the tired soldier dreaming of being reunited with his wife. Photography at the time was said to erode the idea of sentimental domesticity with its truth. Only it wasn’t the truth. If the photographer was physically moving lifeless soldiers to and from who knows where then the photograph was mediated, making it no more truthful than the romanticized drawing and painting.

Now, the media today is unavoidable, and we are well aware that most things are mediated. We see things from a window that they open, so we see what they want to show us. To this day with modern wars and brave soldiers we still see images that display sentimental domesticity.

These two photos, though decades apart, are not unalike. Now, the idea of sentimental domesticity of war is still relevant as we can see, but what about the ruptures? Now, granted the Civil War was a well known conflict at the time seeing as how it was in the US itself and both sides were US natives, but I don’t know that I’d be completely wrong if I say that our overall lack of knowledge of our involvement in Al-Qaeda, Uganda, Iraq and Syria, most of which is still relevant, is surprising. So many of us youngsters don’t know what is going on in places like these. Why don’t we see more images that erode the romanticized feel of war that pictures like the above show, or books and movies like Dear John show. Maybe they would simulate change, or inspire a decent future politician. Who knows?

Work Cited

Currier & Ives. The Soldier’s Dream of Home. 1861. Lithograph, hand color.

The System or Those Who Get Caught Up In It?

There is a well-referenced quote that reads, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” Coincidentally those are Abraham Lincoln’s words. We learned a bit about him in Lecture recently, but I wanted to focus on Fredrick Douglass’s description of Mrs. Auld, in his narrative, Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass. His descriptions of her start out pleasing, but he quickly squashes that idea when he speaks of how she morphs into this demonic creature as a result of becoming a slaveholder. This idea of people becoming these sick and twisted versions of themselves when given power, I think tells us a lot about our history and what a badly equipped system can do to somebody.

From our past history classes we are well aware of historical figures that got washed into the system. Mussolini of Italy would probably be a suitable example. He didn’t begin to bubble up with greed until after he experienced what power felt like and what power could do for him. He set out to establish reforms for Italy, but ended up crossing the finish line not for Italy, but rather for himself, which may be why his name is so infamous today.

What I’m writing about now has a lot to do with to whom we give power and what kind of power that is. As mentioned in a previous blog post, not all men are apt to wield power with an iron fist. Without a doubt, there are some suitable figures of honesty and justice in our history’s past, but there were also people like Ms. Auld. Douglass first describes Mrs. Auld with diction that warms the heart and even falsely gives you hope for the few lines before he shuts those thoughts down with phrases like, “red with rage,” (28) or “harsh and horrid discord,” (28) when he describes her eyes and voice after the effects of slavery overcame her. He emphasizes, “The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands…” (28). Maybe that system of irresponsible power was the sole problem as Douglass suggests.

I’m only wondering, though, if her true character was always the demonic witch that only came to light at the hands of slavery, as Lincoln’s quote suggests, was Mrs. Auld ever genuinely a “woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings” (28) as Douglass first describes? Or was the system of slavery what brought about the change? That may be for you to decipher.

Work Cited

Douglass, Fredrick. Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass. Ed. Ira Dworkin. New York: Penguin, 2014. ISBN-13: 978-0-14-310730-9

Humanities of War

As the fall quarter winds down along with the 2014 year itself, I can’t help but be a little reflective. Blogging about social injustices and their connections to literature, as you may have noticed, wasn’t something I did in my free time. But, I have to say that if it were, it wouldn’t have been a waste of time. I’ve found that many of the social injustices like that on feminism and Ferguson (that were further developed on in my writing here, and through reading my peer’s blogs) have found their way on my separate-from-school social medias, like Twitter and Tumblr. With that being said, I don’t consider my stances and opinions to be done here. War is a topic that I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of, and in all honesty, I’d be lying if I said that I wanted this to be the last I heard of it. It was and is a big part of our history as humans. I’m sure we can still learn from it both out there on the field and in the middle of the streets in a protest. I do think it starts from reading a book on war, or reading a blog, or watching a film, so this course, thus far, has been helpful for me. There is more to war than just mass murder for a cause. There are civil wars, religious wars, social wars, internal wars. There is so much more to it and so many different angles to study it from. I don’t think it stops there, though. After the book, the film, the peer review, the play, I don’t think it ends there. Yes, the thought process is stimulated, but just as Brecht wrote about the Thirty Years war during the Second World War, and Simmone Weil wrote of the Iliad during the Second World War, and the Theatre of War was made during a time of the US involvement somewhere else, most texts like these blogs, and a book or film are trying not only to stimulate thought, but also action today and now for causes that are similar to the past, but relevant now. With that being said, stay alert. Hope to see you all around.

Work Cited

Brecht, Bertolot. Mother Courage and her Children. Trans. Tony Kushner. London:  Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2009. Print. Theater of War. Dir. John W. Walter. Perf. Meryl Streep and Tony Kushner. 2008. Film. Photo source: the-daily-dose-blog.tumblr.com

How Does Man Exercise Power?

There is a saying of Lord Acton’s that reads, “Great men are almost always bad men.” I don’t know about you, but that isn’t necessarily music to my ears. When people are in power they’re apt to display power with an iron fist, lop sided, selfishly, with greed, and without consideration for those they are in power for. Maybe not all, but I can name a few right off the top of my head, like Adolf Hitler, or Yertle the Turtle, or Benito Mussolini and driving us forward a couple decades, one could argue I could add some of the police men and women to that list.

Machiavelli’s text, The Prince, as it says on page 3, is one of the first to “argue explicitly that good government requires the skillful use of cruelty and deception to continually take what belongs to others.” In this work, Machiavelli seems to be all for those hardcore ways to rule, continually mentioning that the most effective way to gain and maintain power is through destruction of its people, but on pages 65 and 67 we see that he has standards. Some people are “wicked” when in rule. Hopefully he would agree that Yertle the Turtle, Mussolini, and Hitler are in the same category as Agathocles the Sicilian. Otherwise, I’m worried about this book in the hands of someone today who just might be power hungry.

I’m only wondering, though, if “great men are almost always bad men,” who do we put in power? Are we screwed?

Maybe not, because I can think of a few historical figures of our past that had power or at least influence, like Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Gandhi, Malcom X who differ from the men and turtle that I had mentioned above. When you think of these people do you still think of corruption, and abuse? They aren’t in the same boat as the men above, because of their use of power. They, for the most part, could be considered selfless, giving, and inspiring. In a manner of speaking they didn’t burn books to limit, they fasted to enlighten. Maybe there is a difference between power and leadership. Which do we really want man to exercise?

Work Cited

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince with Related Documents. Trans. and ed. William J.    Connell. Boston: Bedford/St. Matin’s, 2005. Print.

Seuss. Yertle the Turtle, and Other Stories. New York: Random House, 1958. Print.

A Name or a Product of War?

Mother Courage is a Brechtian play translated by Tony Kushner. Now, as you humanities geniuses may already know, Brechtian plays, consist of Epic Theater compositions. Bertolt Brecht is well known for his use of conventions of Epic Theater in this plays and the like. One example of that would be Mother Courage and Her Children, hopefully we are all familiar with the play and I can easily focus in on scene nine of the play where The Cook makes an offer to Mother Courage to stay at an Inn that he just inherited. (87)

This scene is interesting, I think, because it seamlessly ties in a couple of epic theater conventions that are visible in the text to say a couple of things about war or at least to ignite some thought on the subject. I wanted to point out as well, that as in other scenes, we get these characters names, but we also get their titles and they are most often called by titles not names. We get The Cook and The General, or The Chaplain and The Farmer as opposed to names like Anna. In some cases we get names, but they are different things that distract us from it being a name in and of itself like Lamb, or Swiss Cheese. Yes, Becht is using alienation to distance us from the audience, but maybe he’s doing it to tell us that the names don’t make a difference. War changes a person anyway. It doesn’t matter that your name isn’t The Cook, or the Sargent. You are what you do in the war. Everyone is themselves a military industrial complex. You are the fuel of the war, so you should be called the Second Soldier instead of Bobbert and later Swiss Cheese will not be Swiss Cheese, but rather the Paymaster of the Second Regiment. (26)

Scene nine is an interesting one, though because Mother Courage refers to the Cook as Lamb at least once and The Cook calls her by her first name, Anna, here, too. I think this is done, because his proposal is that of an attempt to escape the war, to stop living off of it through a wagon and start settling into a home where they can live at peace for some time. I think Brecht is trying to show that if they make an effort to distance themselves from the war, their titles aren’t important, rather their names are.

In a song The Cook is belting during this scene, yet another convention of Epic Theater, The Cook mentions, “All virtues are dangerous in a world like this…” (89). Building off of what was mentioned in The Theater of War, Brecht may be trying to tell us that the virtues aren’t what’s wrong here, the world in which they are being expressed is. Especially since the person saying that all virtues are dangerous is The Cook, who represents “pure self-interest.” So their virtues shouldn’t need to change and neither should their names. It should be the world around them that does.

 Work Cited

Brecht, Bertolt. Mother Courage and her Children. Trans. Tony Kushner. London: Bloomsbury Mthuen Drama, 2009. Print.

Newman, Jane. “Brecht 1.” Humanities Lecture. University of California Irvine, Irvine. 5 Nov. 2014.    Lecture.

Theater of War. Dir. John W. Walter. Perf. Meryl Streep and Tony Kushner. 2008. Film.

A Reoccurring War on Religion?

So The Thirty Years’ War… APUSH probably taught you all about its religious causes. I wouldn’t know, in all honesty. Maybe I should’ve taken APUSH. But the go-to cause of the Thirty Years’ War is commonly said to be religion. The fall of the Holy Roman Empire and all its conflicting religious ideologies, that was the basis for the ignition of a war lasting as long as it did. Now, obviously like we’ve learned in lecture with Professor Newman, that’s not the case, seeing as how she brought up two different causes, those being a war on state building and a constitutional war. But, for argument’s sake, I’m going to be building off of the religion cause. I’m only wondering, if so many people (especially before this course) like you, me, and APUSH students, thought the Thirty Years’ War was as oversimplified as a war on religion, why haven’t we learned? What do I mean?

Our First Amendment tells us that there is freedom of religion, which may have been a result of the Thirty Years’ War, but regardless, laws get broken all the time and when they do we happen across wrongdoings like in the picture below.

If the go-to cause of the Thirty Years’ war is religion, why is there still lingering questions and prejudices on the religions preferences of people in America today? “We learn history so as not to repeat it,” but we go around vandalizing religious buildings that aren’t our own, ignoring the fact that our first amendment says there is freedom of religion and our neighboring countries duked out an everlasting war on the subject.

Sure, there are other factors to pictures like this, but there were also other factors to the Thirty Years War. Why was religion a prominently remembered cause? And why when you look at this photo, you don’t immediately think of religious injustices, but instead think of a war on terrorism? Maybe that’s it, then. Some factors just carry more weight than others. Religion was more important in 1618 and in 2014 the fear of terrorism is. But that is not to say we can just throw all the other causes out the window just because we don’t think this is a repeat of a war on religion, but instead one on terror. This is still a shot at the first amendment, still a religious injustice, recognize it or not.

Rest assured, though, we all know that not all of us are so cruel. Just thought I’d ease your mind a bit.

Work Cited

Photo Source:

da-pakistanida-pakistani.tumblr.com

 

How Far Would You Go?

As you may have read, last week I entertained the idea that those police officers that take part in police brutality seem to have a connection to the power holders in the Iliad , at least as far as authority goes. This week I was hoping to move a couple steps further than the authority of our police men and women and focus more on why and how we obey and conform to certain people.

My psychology text book goes into detail of a famous study done in 1962 called the Milgram study that on the surface shows how regular people can cause pain to other people so long as they are being told to do so by an authority figure, regardless of whether or not they think it’s ethically OK to be doing (Gleitman, Gross, Reisberg, 523). In the study’s case, the authority figure is the experimenter, but in the Iliad we can argue that it’s those in power like the gods. Achilles, in book 1, was about to draw his sword to kill Agamemnon, when Athena, a goddess, comes down to urge him to stop and he obeys even if he had a strong hunger to kill Agamemnon then and there (1.227-261). Poseidon, in book 15, yielded to Zeus despite his hesitation to do so (15. 219-258). The Trojan, in book 4, who broke the truce by shooting an arrow at Menelaus only at the will of the goddess Athena (4. 99-150). Why then, despite their hesitation to do these things, do they do them?

We like to think that we do things at our own will and that if placed in a situation, we would not do “evil” things or things that lead us to unhinge our own principles, but Milgram’s study, which has time and time again been retested, shows on the surface that we will. We conform. We will yield to people in authority. And this study has been used to explain huge faults in our history like genocides and how they got as far as they did. It’s partly because people conform. They yield to their superior. It can be argued that the Nazi guards in these concentration camps didn’t think what they were doing was right, but they did it anyway, much like Achilles, Poseidon, and the Trojan archer.

Now, of course we have our constraints as a society, and conformity can be a reasonable thing like how we obey laws and the like, but harming others? Where does it stop if at all? We’d think that the Iliad in terms of the violence and willingness to do as others say is farfetched from today, but it may not be.

Work Cited

Gleitman, Henry and James Gross and Daniel Reisberg. Eighth Edition Psychology. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. Print.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Print