MdS 3001W forum post

1.  Discuss some of the cultural, political, social and economic conditions that were written about in the essays.  Focus on those that felt significant to you and explain why.

I was in college the first time when “All Consuming Patriotism” was written, the year after 9/11. Although I don't believe I read the article, I did have discussions with friends about many of the ideas in this essay. We were struck by how reflexive and adamant the rush to defend the growth of the economy was, even more struck than the rush to war, which we knew well enough to expect. We thought that 9/11 should be a cause for reflection and re-evaluation, not a time to automatically “keep shopping.” Frazier says it beautifully, “Money and the economy have gotten so tangled up in our politics that we forget we're citizens of our government, not its consumers. And the leaders we elect, who got where they are by selling themselves to us with television ads, and who often are only on short loan from the corporate world anyway, think of us as customers who must be kept happy. There's a scarcity of ideas about how to direct all this patriotic feeling because usually the market, not the country, occupies our minds.”
Jared Diamond's “The Ends of the World as We Know Them” also struck me for how its insights are relevant to today's United States, or more realistically the US-led world economic and political system. First of all, Diamond's comparison that, “If 6,000 Polynesians with stone tools were able to destroy Mangareva Island, consider what six billion people with metal tools and bulldozers are doing today.” While this immense power has been clear to me, I have never heard it expressed so vividly. Diamond's conclusion later in the essay seems especially relevant in light of the current “Occupy” protests around the world. “History teaches us two deeper lessons about what separates successful societies from those headed for failure. A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions. … The other deep lesson involves a willingness to re-examine long-held core values, when conditions change and those values no longer make sense.” The idea that elites are insulated from the consequences of their action is clearly connected to the Occupy movement's most united message, the idea of the 1% and 99%. I think that the “willingness to re-examine long-held core values” can be seen at the heart of what has been the loudest criticism of the movement: its lack of coherent “demands.” A re-examining of core values seems to be in fact exactly what the movement wants, but that cannot reasonably be demanded of the existing system or legislated into existence. More importantly the tangible aftermath of such a re-examination is not possible to predict ahead of time.



2.  Discuss which essay helped you see something about a society or a social issue in a way that you'd never considered before or were aware of.   
“Reading Lolita in Tehran” gave me new insight into the reality of life under a truly repressive regime in Iran. It is easy to take for granted, here in the United States, a relatively free ability to speak your mind. While certain unpopular opinions may cost you social prestige or even legal or economic difficulties, suffering physical harm for bucking a social custom or speaking out is extremely rare. More importantly, with a few glaring examples, the government is neither the perpetrator of nor complicit in such violence. In Iran, on the contrary, the slightest infractions can lead to harsh punishment by both government forces and government-supported vigilantes. Nafisi's students remained defiant, pushing the limits whenever safety allowed, and sometimes even when it didn't.
One idea from the essay led me to think about our society in a way I had never considered. Talking about her students, who grew up under the regime and never knew freedom, Nafisi says, “Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry.” Around the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I read an article about kids who are in high school now who were just old enough to have clear memories of the attacks, and how profoundly it has shaped their lives. Anyone younger than them, and probably for the most part those kids as well, will only have second-hand memories of a time before the war on terror, the PATRIOT act, taking off your shoes and throwing away your toothpaste at the airport, and needing a passport to go to Canada. Will these kids also have a vague longing for the things we older people describe, what Nafisi calls the “void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us?”