This is water

As you perhaps have been informed, I have to leave the country to go to Colombia and be a kingpin. Only hurdle is, as usual, the law. I have a date at the police station. I hope you will work diligently, although I am not here to guide you. I hope you will take this opportunity to think about life and what you can make of it, perhaps being inspired (or not 😉 ) by the words of David Foster Wallace. Perhaps you to will go to Colombia, or perhaps to Kista Gallerian?

TASK
I want you to watch this film today, read the transcript (if you need to quote something), and write me at least 300 words individually on what David Foster Wallace’s speech has to say to human beings and to you.

Heading: Reflections on Wallace’s This is Water speech

Transcript

“Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “teaching you how to think.” If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education–least in my own case–is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though — most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

A SUMMARY: discipline and control in modern society

This spring we will read One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, but we also read Jia Tolentino’s article ”The I in the Internet”.

These two texts seem to have nothing to do with one another, but actually, they share the same preoccupation: social control of the individual and fiction’s influence on the world of the living.

In Cuckoo’s Nest  we find a story of how a mental hospital works like a machine to discipline and control ”insanity”, craziness. In the story, patients are monitored, shamed, dominated, and even physically abused. But most of them don’t strike us as insane or psychotic, but rather as quirky, or weird.

Doctors and nurses dominate the inmates by, for instance, controlling what is said and how it is interpreted, and even through (mock) democracy the patients are brought to submission, brought to conform to what is considered ”normal” by those who are in charge. The nurses and doctors have the power to define who is, and who isn’t normal. Inmates are forced to confess to inner secrets and are shamed for them, and the significance of their confessions belong to those in power, not to those who uttered them. This is an example of how modern power, in a sense, controls language and meaning.

Furthermore, the book gives us a story which uses fiction as a reference, metaphor, and comparison . Ultimately the use of fictional references, clichés, and stereotypes becomes a pattern hard not to notice in the book. Characters are a bit likecardboard stereotypes: drunk, fighting Irishmen, stupid black men, evil – or sexually repressed women with a need for power over men. The stereotypes, the clichés, and the world of fiction become visible to us, and we realize that although these conventions are wrong and racist, or misogynistic they still influence this world, since it shapes our perception of the world.

In ”The I of the Internet”, we are shown how social media relies heavily on photoshopped photos, photos of ideal brunches, and perfect settings. This creates pressure to live up to ideals that aren’t real, but fiction.

We are also shaped by the selection of news, the pages that Google prioritizes. Try to find out how many people got killed in Iraq due to sanctions in the 1990s, for instance. (I tried, but did not succeed). And try to find out how many died in the Armenian genocide, early 1900s. How come you can find out about something that happened 120 years ago, but not about something that happened 20 years ago? Is the facts filtered out? Are there forces that control what is said and what it means in society today?

Online we are also disciplined by the likes and thumbs up of the crowd, or shamed, or met by hate from trolls. We even have to self-monitor and keep a steady eye on what we say and write on the Internet, as things once published can stay forever, affecting our careers, our dating, etc.

There is at the same time a strong pressure to show yourself on the internet. To be visible, or even hyper-visible. Constantly posting on Twitter and Instagram. Constantly seen and judged. Disciplined. We have a freedom to express ourselves but we are aware of the pressure of our times, and it is difficult to not fall in line.

Some scholars nowadays talk about a new kind of ”cyberculture” and ”the global standardization of thought”, of how we are disciplined to think the same way, (the normal way). They speak of a society much like the one in Cuckoo’s Nest.

TASK

  1. Try to find out how many people got killed in Iraq due to sanctions in the 1990s, for instance. (I tried, but did not succeed). And try to find out how many died in the Armenian genocide, early 1900s. How come you can find out about something that happened 120 years ago, but not about something that happened 20 years ago, do you think?

2. In what sense do we live in a society controlled by what others expect and run by people who decide what is right and what is wrong?

Minimum requirement 10 sentences or half a page,

Advanced English Drama – ”Famous Encounters”

Two famous English-speaking persons accidentally run into each other and I’d like you to enact their conversation.

But you must not use their names in your presentation because afterwards your audience is supposed to guess what persons you tried to introduce.’

Accordingly your conversation must be based on some facts well-known by your spectators. Otherwise you have got totally free hands.

(Don’t make it too easy, add something well known with some kind of smoke-screen if needed.)

Your conversation should go on for about five minutes.

Task

  1. Prepare, write manuscript and rehearse.
  2. Next class sdo encounter. Or if you work fast, do the famous encounter today! Ten minutes before the class ends, we could squeeze in one or two. 🙂

Good luck! 🙂

Dream and Disaster

We learned last time that the American Dream was never as great as in the movies. Many who moved to America did not have the success they dreamed of. We talked about how many Swedes who migrated in the mid 1800s ended up in shanty towns like Swede Hollow.

Swede Hollow

But on the silver screen stories of success, of courage, and of the great boundless wealth of America was commonplace.

Paradise Lost

The first crisis in confidence in the American Dream can, arguably, be seen in the 1960s. The dream was perhaps a nightmare? This was shown on television, in the news. News of civil unrest due to racial tensions, pictures from the war in Vietnam, and perhaps most importantly the live television murder of John F. Kennedy, the president of the United States.

Hope, youth, and Camelot

The hope and energy of the post-war years was embodied in the youth and intelligence of John F Kennedy who is well known for his speech on liberty and hope. The image of his family is very special. They were a kind of fashionable nobility in the United states.


Fashionable, young, and smart

Kennedy’s Inaugural address

[Full text]

Death of JFK reported by Walter Cronkite

The Zapruder film in the motion picture film JFK

How the assassination of Kennedy influenced the US

”During the day of the assassination and the next three days, the nation would be bound together by television not only in shock but in mourning. From shortly after the shots in Dallas on Friday to the conclusion of the funeral services in Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, America’s three television networks canceled all regular programs and all advertising, and carried only news related to the assassination and the events that followed, in coverage uninterrupted by commercials. As the day of the assassination and the three days of memorial pageantry for John Fitzgerald Kennedy unfolded in Washington, America sat before its television sets watching it as if the country was gathered in one vast living room: a nation that was, for those four days, a single audience—in a way that had never happened before in history. A survey by the A. C. Nielsen Company, the leading commercial firm conducting television surveys, showed that during these four days approximately 166 million Americans in fifty-one million homes were tuned in at some time to the Kennedy coverage—and surveys by Nielsen and social science organizations showed that in most homes the time was substantial: during the four days, according to these surveys, the average American family watched the ceremonies for an almost incredible total of 31.6 hours, almost eight hours per day. The pervasiveness well the immediacy of television coverage made the assassination and the events following it an event “probably without parallel in the past,” the Social Science Research Council said. Not only was “President Kennedy’s loss the first loss of a national leader reported in any such detail on the picture tubes of a nation,” but ”For all practical purposes there was no other news story in America during those four days,” a study by the National Opinion Research Center concluded. “There were times during those days when a majority of all Americans were apparently looking at the same events and hearing the same words from their television sets – participating together … in a great national event. Nothing like this on such a scale had ever occurred before.”

Robert Caro, The Passage of Power (2013)

Task

  1. Look up the words in bold face.
  2. How was the assassination of Kennedy special in the history of the United States, according to Robert Caro?
  3. After the murder, people came to talk about what they did when Kennedy was assassinated. Why do you think that is?
  4. How do you explain the popularity of the Kennedys? Even today there is a chain of stores named ”Jackie”, after Jackie Kennedy. Why do you think the store chose that name? Look at the store’s line of clothing and do a picture search on Jackie Kennedy on Google. What do you think?

Art of Persuasion 1

Today you will be working in groups to analyse a short speech or extract.

Each group will give a presentation to the class, covering the following points:

  1. What is the speaker’s aim or objective?
  2. What techniques does the speaker use?
  3. What ideals or principles does the speaker appeal to?
  4. In what ways is the speech similar or different to others we have seen.

Malcolm X, speech about police brutality

Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Message to the people of America on the partition of India, 1947.

John F. Kennedy 1961, Inaugural address, Washington, D.C. (Full text)

Martin Luther King’s , 1943 speech 28 augusti 1963 at Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. (Full text)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vDWWy4CMhE

The American Story

It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs. The hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores. The hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta. The hope of a mill worker’s son who dares to defy the odds. The hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him too. Hope! Hope in the face of difficulty! Hope in the face of uncertainty! The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation. A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.

A City upon a Hill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill

Manifest Destiny

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny

Opening scene

Convenience store, second scene

The Poem

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

by Langston Hughes

The roots of a nation

To properly understand the US you have to study its history and the conditions under which Americans have developed. The people that came to colonize northern America were typically very daring and enterprising people. They had dared to cross the Atlantic in order to reach the New World. Many of them were very religious people who had fled the religious repression of many of the European states.

A great many of the settlers who came to America actually thought of themselves as God’s emissaries. They saw themselves as establishing His kingdom on the new continent. To these people America was the Promised Land, a New Canaan.Some of the colonists came to speak of themselves as citizens of the City upon a Hill. A phrase they had got from Matthew 5:14 ”Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid”. The colonist thought that they were chosen to build a new nation which was to set an example to all others.

These beliefs – that the Americans are the chosen people living in a country reserved for them by God and that they have been set there to be an example to others – have continued to live through American history and are still, in a secularized form, very much alive. In actions and in words, in foreign and domestic policy Americans have often looked upon themselves as a model for the world and as both savior and police with divine sanction

An expression of this belief is the fact that many Americans shared the conviction in the nineteenth century that it was the manifest destiny of the United States to expand all the way to the Pacific Ocean. One of the many literary expressions of this is this passage from Herman Melville’s White-Jacket: ”[a]nd we Americans are the peculiar chosen people— the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of liberties of the world”.

Progress and problems

The first colonists’ dream of a blessed land, a land of plenty, was soon discovered to be something quite different. The hardships of these first Americans were many: they died of all sorts of diseases, the land was wild and they had a hard time to survive.

The overall economic success of America, however, has many reasons: the rich natural resources that could be simply taken from the indigenous population (as they were virtually annihilated), and the vastness of the country, people were allowed to compete on their own merits (in Europe the feudal system was very rigid and did not let people go into business for themselves). In some ways the mentality of the people had something to do with it as well: the colonists were very ambitious and optimistic. They truly believed in the dream of social and material success. They thought that everything was possible.

The firm belief in progress and development met with many problems. Many colonists did not succeed, others lost heart and became pessimistic and bitter. Throughout the years more and more people have come to America with their visions and dreams, some have succeeded others have not. America is in this sense a country of extremes a land of the rich as well as of the poor. The progress in some fields (space travel or entertainment industry) do not overshadow problems such as segregation, racism and ecrime.

Manifest destiny in our century

As previously stated the ideas of the City upon a Hill and Manifest Destiny still live, although in a slightly altered form.

The Apollo program in itself represents, in a sense, a continuation of the pioneering spirit of the US; it represents the will to expand, to go forward, to claim, to manifest destiny – to continue, in a metaphorical sense, the journey Westward.

Questions

The US sees itself as special. The Americans feel they have a special role to play in the world.

How do we see this in Obama’s speech, and elsewhere?

Sweden has perhaps a different self-image? What would you say is typically Swedish

The Gaze

Some critics see power as working through ”the gaze”. The ones who watch are those who have the power. Those who are being watched are those who are controlled. It is described this in Focault’s book The Birth of the Clinic, but also Focault’s book about the history of the prison.

Here Foucault shows us the panopticon by Jeremy Bentham, the all-seeing prison.

800px-panopticon

800px-presidio-modelo2

The concept of the gaze have become very important to feminist thinkers, and to queer criticism (who both study how concepts of the body and gender are constructed as systems of power in society). The gaze is a process of objectification and pacification. In movies there is a portrayal of women that essentially makes them subordinated to male ideas of women’s bodies. The movies construct an ideal body and an ideal gender. Women are rendered objects to watch in the dark anonymity of the cinema.

In art there has been a reaction against the ”politics of the body” and the ”genderization” of the female and the construction of the female identity. (Through the gaze and the processes of objectification in for instance cinema).

In post-colonial criticism the concept of the gaze has also become important. Most news about the Middle-east is written in the west, bys so-called experts and journalists. Often the east is described as violent, filled with terrorism, and victims. The peoples in the Middle-east rarely have the power to tell their stories.

Abou naddara, an anonymous art collective, tries to give a dignified image of human life in Syria. Not the bleeding and dirty body of the war reports, not the victim, not ”the other”. Here the woman as presented as human, as us, as ”the same”.

The Danger of a single story

Questions

1. What is the main point that Adichie makes in her TED talk when she describes her experience of reading Western children’s books?

2. At the end of her TED talk, what is Adichie urging us (her audience members) to do?

3. What is the relevance of Adichie’s message to everyday life

Homework

Bring two quotes for next Tuesday and their justifications.

Reading practice: by any means necessary

malcolm-x-carbine-ebony

Read the text below carefully and answer the questions below.

Salaam Alaikum, Mr. Moderator, our distinguished guests, brothers and sisters, our friends and our enemies, everybody who’s here.

[1]As many of you know, last March when it was announced that I was no longer in the Black Muslim movement, it was pointed out that it was my intention to work among the 22 million non-Muslim Afro-Americans and to try and form some type of organisation[…] And that we would have some kind of meeting and determine at a later date whether to form a black nationalist party or a black nationalist army.

[2] There have been many of our people across the country from all walks of life who have taken it upon themselves to try and pool their ideas and to come up with some kind of solution to the problem that confronts all of our people. And tonight we are here to try and get an understanding of what it is they’ve come up with.

Fortsätt läsa ”Reading practice: by any means necessary”

English 7 – the beginning

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Welcome to English 7. This is the last and final course in English in secondary school. The level in this course is fairly advanced.

The course plan can be found here. The course focusses on furthering your command of English. We will read literature, research and discuss various subjects.

We will briefly talk about:

  • Who I am and what I have done
  • Who you are and what you have done
  • What we all can do to make the most of this course

Today we will resolve two tasks, and possibly a third one.

Task 1: Warm-up, What does your name mean?
Using a dictionary, google or any other resource, you are going to find and write down an appropriate adjective that begins with each letter of their first name. For example:
Flirtatious, Relaxed, Extrovert, Desirable

Task 2: Expectations, fears, resources

In pairs. Discuss your expectations, fears and resources, i.e. how you can contribute to the course.

After the talk. Write me a letter where you tell me what you hope we will do, what you hope we won’t do, and what you can bring to the course.

Let’s use the traditional style:

Dear Mr Wernegren,

Best wishes,

Name

Task 3: Learn key concepts

A City upon a Hill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill

Manifest Destiny

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny

Opening scene

Convenience store, second scene

The Poem

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

by Langston Hughes

The roots of a nation

To properly understand the US you have to study its history and the conditions under which Americans have developed. The people that came to colonize northern America were typically very daring and enterprising people. They had dared to cross the Atlantic in order to reach the New World. Many of them were very religious people who had fled the religious repression of many of the European states.

A great many of the settlers who came to America actually thought of themselves as God’s emissaries. They saw themselves as establishing His kingdom on the new continent. To these people America was the Promised Land, a New Canaan.

Some of the colonists came to speak of themselves as citizens of the City upon a Hill. A phrase they had got from Matthew 5:14 ”Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid”. The colonist thought that they were chosen to build a new nation which was to set an example to all others. These beliefs – that the Americans are the chosen people living in a country reserved for them by God and that they have been set there to be an example to others – have continued to live through American history and are still, in a secularized form, very much alive. In actions and in words, in foreign and domestic policy Americans have often looked upon themselves as a model for the world and as both savior and police with divine sanction

An expression of this belief is the fact that many Americans shared the conviction in the nineteenth century that it was the manifest destiny of the United States to expand all the way to the Pacific Ocean. One of the many literary expressions of this is this passage from Herman Melville’s White-Jacket: ”[a]nd we Americans are the peculiar chosen people— the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of liberties of the world”.

Progress and problems

The first colonists’ dream of a blessed land, a land of plenty, was soon discovered to be something quite different. The hardships of these first Americans were many: they died of all sorts of diseases, the land was wild and they had a hard time to survive.

The overall economic success of America, however, has many reasons: the rich natural resources that could be simply taken from the indigenous population (as they were virtually annihilated), and the vastness of the country, people were allowed to compete on their own merits (in Europe the feudal system was very rigid and did not let people go into business for themselves). In some ways the mentality of the people had something to do with it as well: the colonists were very ambitious and optimistic. They truly believed in the dream of social and material success. They thought that everything was possible.

The firm belief in progress and development met with many problems. Many colonists did not succeed, others lost heart and became pessimistic and bitter. Throughout the years more and more people have come to America with their visions and dreams, some have succeeded others have not. America is in this sense a country of extremes a land of the rich as well as of the poor. The progress in some fields (space travel or entertainment industry) do not overshadow problems such as segregation, racism and ecrime.

Manifest destiny in our century

As previously stated the ideas of the City upon a Hill and Manifest Destiny still live, although in a slightly altered form.

The Apollo program in itself represents, in a sense, a continuation of the pioneering spirit of the US; it represents the will to expand, to go forward, to claim, to manifest destiny – to continue, in a metaphorical sense, the journey Westward.

Questions

The US sees itself as special. The Americans feel they have a special role to play in the world.

How do we see this in film, books and in the news?

Sweden has perhaps a different self-image? What would you say is typically Swedish?