Bland Analysis of Williams' piece

In "The Clan of One-Breasted Women," our class had discussed about how Williams advocated for civil disobedience to pressure the government into solving certain issues (that is, if the government isn't doing anything).  In this post, I would like to elaborate on some textual evidence on how Terry Tempest Williams conveys her attitude of obedience.

When Williams describes the case of Irene Allen as "God-fearing people," she is referring to how Allen said "I am not blaming the government" (930).  Basically, Williams is saying that trying to solve the issue of nuclear radiation by using the government (which Williams claims to have the authority of "God") has proved fruitless because the U.S. government hasn't done much about nuclear radiation.  She emphasizes this point by saying "our government is immune;" it is "immune" to any issues where the government is supposedly responsible (Williams 930).  Williams also says that Mrs. Allen is not the only person to stay obedient to the government by stating "This is just one story in anthology of thousands" (Williams 930).  In fact, Williams clearly includes how her own family practiced "obedience" to the government, and it never solved the danger of nuclear radiation.  Because her mother died from cancer and was obedient, Williams was motivated to "question everything" (931).  In other words, Williams wants to practice civil disobedience because "blind obedience...ultimately takes our lives" (931).  This perhaps explains why Terry Tempest Williams "crossed the line at the Nevada Test Site" because she believes her act of civil disobedience is a step forward in solving the issue of nuclear radiation.

A Mock Letter from a Peacock to Tannen

Dear Deborah Tannen,

I have recently read your essay about how "there is no unmarked women" (Tannen 556).  I was quite intrigued by your your argument; but I also found it mind-boggling to think about.  Perhaps it is because I am a peacock that I fail to grasp how humans view gender.  In fact, instead of having no "unmarked" females, as you suggest with humans, we have no "unmarked" males.  We peacocks are expected by the peahens to bear many eye-spotted feathers on our tail.  If one lacks such feathers, he is considered to be noticeably unattractive among peafowl.  If one has plenty of these feathers, he is considered to be one of the most beautiful peacocks.  Regardless of the number of tail feathers, peafowl almost always gab about how some peacocks are pretty while others are ugly.  My wife, for instance, brags about the enormous amount of feathers I possess to her friends.  (Both of us are pictured below).  I also happened to see feather-lacking peacocks try to use branches and leaves to make fake quills*; they probably hope that other peafowl would not notice their disguised ugliness.  Meanwhile, peahens "have the option of being unmarked" (Tannen 553).  They do not have fancy feathers like mine, yet they are "unmarked."  No one ever gossips about peahens' physical qualities.  Even my wife never gets bashed or complimented for her looks.  Peahens can make themselves "marked" if they dress up in any strange clothing, but males do not have the choice to make themselves "unmarked."  My point is, that the gender roles in peafowl society are pretty reversed when compared to human society.  So that is why I have trouble understanding your kind's mindset; it is almost as if our societies belong to different worlds

Sincerely,

Fictional Peacock

*Author's note: This does not happen in real life.  Also, there are some other false facts about peacocks in this post.

"About Men" paragraph

In "About Men" Gretel Ehrlich states that "young cowboys are often evasive with women... they don't know how to bring their tenderness into the house" (572)  She is obviously saying that cowboys can be shy around women.  Yet, this statement does make the slight implication that cowboys are shy around women simply because they have different genders; however, others might argue, in a different interpretation of Ehrlich's statement, that it is the job that makes cowboys gentle like Ghandi.*  Ehrlich does, of course, writes about how cowboys step away from their inner fears into outer space to save cow or cattle.  In fact, she even says "A cowboy is someone who love his work.  Since the hours are long... and the pay is $30 he has to" (Ehrlich 571).  According to my personal interpretation, Ehrlich is saying that cowboys "love" their work not because they enjoy sleeping in a cavern, but because they earn a satisfactory amount of money.  Cowboys only risk heir lives to save cows because it is their job to do so.  He doesn't always feel a complete total attachment to the cattle (the cows will get slaughtered at a meat processing factory anyway), he just really needs to get the money.  And because cowboys do not often hang around with women while working, they tend to be shy around women.  This does raise some interesting questions though: Why do only men get to be cowboys during the 19th century?  Why weren't there any cowgirls? These questions do not only apply to cowboys, but also football and ping-pong.  In football, there rarely seems to be any known female athletes; there are only male football players (at least in professional football).  Table tennis is not quite as extreme as football in gender segregation.  However, professional ping-pong is often split into male and female tournaments, preventing men and women from playing against each other.  Even several centuries ago when there were still powerful monarchs in Europe (who get called "Your majesty," "Your honor," etc.), there was an excessive majority of male rulers.  Also, male monarchs are noticeably called "kings" while female monarchs are called "queens," implying gender segregation in language since both kinds of rulers are not addressed by the same title.  There are even many more examples of gender segregation that are not included in this post.  My point is that is it fair for women to not participate in activities that are considered to be men's jobs?  It is fair for men and women to do participate together in activities such as sports?  Feel free to answer in the comments.

*According to the internet, this name should be spelled as "Gandhi," not "Ghandi."  So Ms. Valentino may have incorrectly spelled his name.  Also, it is bit of a hyperbole to compare the gentleness of cowboys to that of Gandhi because Gandhi did not treat women very well.  In fact, according to an article I found on the Internet, he was a misogynist.  (The link to the article is below this footnote).

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jan/27/mohandas-gandhi-women-india

On my Understanding of Sarcasm

For almost my entire life, I have struggled to understand sarcasm.  I have interpreted the literal meaning (or denotation) of people's phrases instead of their figurative meaning (or connotation) for a long time.  For example, when I first read Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (sometime before my junior year), I actually thought Swift really wanted to use children as "food" (405).  Since then, I assumed Swift was twisted and insane.  It wasn't until my tenth grade English teacher clarified that Swift's paper was a satire that I started viewing him as not so crazy.  Unfortunately, my new understanding of "A Modest Proposal" still didn't prepare me to identify sarcasm all the time.  When having conversations with people, it often takes me five to ten minutes to process any sarcastic remarks.  I have to constantly distinguish between the literal meaning of words and the connotation of words.  Oftentimes, when I am listening to a speech or reading a sarcastic essay, I need more information than what the speech or essay provides to help me understand any sarcastic remarks without taking them too literally.  (I apologize for being too repetitive.)  For instance, if a teacher jokingly says that he will take a point off of my test for asking a stupid question, I will need to know for sure that he will not take off that point in order to understand his joke.  If I am missing this piece of information, a heated argument will likely initiate between the teacher and me.  Fortunately, I now am getting a grasp of what sarcasm is like (thanks to 11 AP English's stressful workload), but I still have a long way to go.

Why the Lobster?

I am willing to admit that David Foster Wallace's essay, "Consider the Lobster" did make a good point.  It is true that many animals suffer severe pains from being turned into food.  I do appreciate how Wallace tries to raise questions of this issue, but there are a few components of the essay that I would like to criticize about.  Also, I will act as a devil's advocate against Wallace's argument.

Wallace vividly describes the various ways a lobster can experience "painful stimuli" and even uses scientific evidence to back his claim (Wallace 673).  However, one may weakly argue that lobsters do not easily feel pain because that they do not have a "cerebral cortex" to feel any pain (qtd. in Wallace 673).  This is a weak claim because Wallace easily makes a rebuttal by saying "this... claim is either false or fuzzy" (Wallace 673).  Nevertheless, there is still a different argument to be made that does not reject the assumption that lobsters feel pain.  It states that feeling pain is a part of being alive and is unavoidable.  In other words, animals will feel pain while being eaten simply because of the food chain.  Predators will keep on gruesomely and inhumanely eating prey even if all humans stopped eating meat.  In fact, humans abusing a lamb for food is just as cruel as a lamb being eaten by wolves while the lamb is conscious.  Therefore, humans should not care if about the pain animals suffer because of the food chain (or food web).  Such consumption is simply a part of the cycle of life.  (I am playing as a devil's advocate as I write this paragraph.  So I personally do not completely agree with this justification of animal abuse.)

Now I am going to give a personal criticism of "Consider the Lobster."  I have always wondered why would Wallace choose a lobster out of all of the animals he could have chosen from (besides the fact that he visited the Maine Lobster Festival).  In my opinion, there are many other examples of animals cruelty that could've served as better examples.  In France, Geese get forcefully fattened even when they are not hungry so foie gras can be well made.  In China, rabbits are skinned alive and have their fur gets processed into coats.  (I do not know why they have to be alive.)  In Korea, farmed puppies are hanged on a tree branch and are beaten to death (before being incinerated) to produce "better" meat.  In America, chickens are drugged to have bigger breasts; but this increase in mass had gave the chickens more weight than their delicate, limp legs could carry.  There are many more scenarios I can list, but I can't list them all because there are far too many of them.  However, I do think that if Wallace used a bird or a mammal instead of a lobster, he would've made a bigger impact.  After all, less people feel empathy for a lobster's suffering than that for a cow.  In fact, many people in the real world would like to see lobsters get cooked as seen with the World's Largest Lobster Cooker being "an attraction" (Wallace 675).  To put it bluntly, a lobster's life is treated like that of an "insect" (Wallace 666).  Very few people will feel bad for a squashed fly or a poisoned ant; this attitude is roughly similar to that of cooking a lobster since most people don't think about an arthropod's pain.  If Wallace wrote about a mammal, his essay may be more effective on his audience than it already is because many more people can connect to a mammal's feelings.  They know that mammals clearly have a brain to sense pain. (Unlike lobsters, which don't have much of a brain.)  Therefore, Wallace's essay may have a bigger impact on people's minds if he wrote about a different animal.  (I am not saying "Consider the Lobster" was not effective at all, I am saying it could be more meaningful with some alterations.)

Physical, not Verbal (and other stuff)

I had found Brad Manning's "Arm Wrestling with my Father" quite compelling.  In fact, since Ms. Valentino pointed out some "form meets content" in the essay, I almost believed that Manning did not write the essay as a college freshman.  Since I loved the essay so much, I will write about it in this post.

What I want to point out is the physical relationship between Manning and his father.  I know there was plenty of hard-to-find evidence that was pointed out for this relationship, but I will try to do my best to introduce some new evidence with analysis.  There is some imagery when Manning describes his father's hugs by saying "They made me suck in my breath and struggle for control, and the way he would pound on my back made rumbles in my ears." (Manning 147).  Since the imagery is both tactile and auditory, it further contributes to the idea that "words were physical" (Manning 145).  Manning is claiming that he could feel his father's expressions through his father's hugs.  The onomatopoeia of the word "pound" helps create an analogy with the imagery between verbal words and physical words (Manning 147).

There are even some other examples of "form meets content" that we didn't discuss in class (in terms of what I remember of the discussion).  The way Manning uses a short sentence that is "It was not a long match" (Manning 146) emphasizes how short the arm wrestling match was.  In contrast, Manning uses longer sentences in paragraph 4 to show how the arm wrestling matches seemed longer when Manning was younger.

Discussion of Disabilities

Our discussion on Friday about Nancy Mairs' essay titled "Disability" had strongly reminded me about some disabled students at Troy High.  I will briefly write about one of these disabled students, Ann.*  I do not exactly know what type of disability Ann has, but I can describe what I know about her condition.  She seems to be unable to move most of her limbs, which forces her to ride in a wheelchair.  When she talks, her words are slightly challenging to understand since her mouth is partially paralyzed (which I concluded from my observations, but I don't know for sure).  When I first saw Ann, I thought "Oh dear, what a poor, crippled girl!"  I later regretted saying that statement in my mind.  The reason why is that I wasn't viewing Ann as an ordinary human at the time (even though I thought that I did so at that moment).  I was perceiving Ann as a helpless "cripple" (Mairs 14).  I realized this former perception when I read Mairs' statement of how she is "not... Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease" (14).  That sentence made me feel that I was amorally discriminating against Ann (and other disabled people) by saying "It must be terrible to live with disabilities!"  Thanks to Mairs, I now know that in order to treat disabled people as ordinary, I will have to behave as if the disabled people I meet have no disabilities.  (I am not saying that I will make a lie that disabled people do not have disabilities).

I know that I could have written a fictional narrative about a person with disabilities instead of mentioning Ann, but I am not qualified to write such a story.  That is because I am not disabled, so I wouldn't completely understand how disabled people would feel.   While it is true that I some idea of disabled people's emotions, I would have to be disabled myself to get the true understanding.  I can find a way to give myself a disability, but I am not willing to do that.

*Names of Troy High School students have been changed, so don't bother looking up any names in the yearbook.