Question: Is there a dark side to American success?
I believe that there is a dark side to the American Dream. The American Dream is that someone can start out poor, work really hard, and then become really rich and successful. This is really hard to achieve; but if someone manages to, it never is what they expect it be like. A good example of this is Jay Gatsby.
Before Gatsby became rich, he was James Gatz. The son of unsuccessful farmers, he always dreamed he should be rich. He even said that "his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents" (Fitzgerald 104). He was determined to become wealthy, no matter what the cost. Since he couldn't become rich legally, he became rich illegally. He expected that once he was wealthy, everything would fall into place. Daisy would be his and everything would be perfect. However, this is not the case. Daisy is married to another man, but this doesn't stop Gatsby. He is prepared to do whatever is necessary to make her his "and to this conception he was faithful to the end" (Fitzgerald 104). But Daisy doesn't feel the same way, thereby crushing Gatsby's dream; she states, "'Oh you want too much!'" (Fitzgerald 134). Until the day he died, he never gave up on his dream. He truly was ""faithful to the end" (Fitzgerald 104). Gatsby did achieve the American Dream, but it didn't turn out to be everything he expected it to be.
This week, we read a speech given by David Foster Wallace to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. In this speech, he talked about how "the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about." This reminded me of Tony Stark because he couldn't see that his weapons caused more harm than good until he experienced it himself.
Before Tony Stark became Iron Man, he was the CEO of Stark Industries, a weapons company. He designed and created weapons for the U.S. military but his weapons were sold to other countries as well. Tony only wanted his weapons to be sold to the United States, but he was too involved in his "lens of self" to realize what was going on. All he cared about was making money and partying. He was too distracted by his own needs that he never paid attention to what was going on "right in front of [him]."
That all changed when he was kidnapped in Afghanistan after he gave a weapon demonstration to the U.S. soldiers. While he was there, he realized that the same weapons he created to protect innocent people were also the ones the terrorists were using to hurt them. He escaped the cave he was held in by creating the iron man suit. After that, he improved his suit and started using it help people because he finally realized that he is not the "center of the world." The world was suffering because he was being "self-centered" and he wanted to put an end to it. Tony started to "experience" events in a new way, which is all David Foster Wallace asked for.
Set rules of punctuation allow writers to express their feelings and tone in their work, much like pauses and changes in pitch do when speaking. Looking at the photo above, Snoopy's feelings are clear because the punctuation rules state that question marks show confusion and exclamation points can show anger or shock. If these rules changed, the meaning of this cartoon would be misinterpreted and the feelings the artist originally wanted to convey would be lost. In "Notes on Punctuation", a colon is said to "give you the feeling of being ordered around" and exclamation points are "irritating" (Source D). These connotations that are linked to the punctuation reveal the many ways that they can express an author's feelings and create tone. Elizabeth Austen in "On Punctuation" uses flowery language in poem to express her emotions because she didn't use any punctuation in it. It is a waste of time for an author to use more adjectives than needed to convey tone when a simple piece of punctuation would suffice. Ben Dolnick in "Semicolons: A Love Story" hated semicolons but then discovered that "no other piece of punctuation...captures the way in which our thoughts are both liquid and solid, wave and particle" (Source E). He realized that no other piece of punctuation conveys the same meaning as a semicolon. Each piece of punctuation has its own feeling associated with it. By changing the rules, it would lead to the misinterpretation of tone and the emotions the author originally wanted to convey would be gone.
"You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. The master had said, 'You are ugly people.' They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. 'Yes,' they had said. 'You are right.'" (Morrison 39).
This passage, I believe, is the most important passage in The Bluest Eye because it explains why the Breedloves are ugly. They are not physically ugly, but since they believe they are, people consider them ugly. The "all-knowing master" who has given them the "cloak of ugliness" represents how white society has created this beauty standard that is impossible to live up to. The movies, magazines, and all other sources of entertainment depicted only whites, creating a standard that you had to be white in order to be beautiful. Since the Breedloves could not find anything to contradict this statement, they believed it to be a fact.
A similar situation happened in The Avengers to Bruce Banner, otherwise known as the Hulk. When Banner's heart rate gets too high, he turns into the Hulk. When he is the Hulk, he doesn't have control over himself and can cause a lot of damage. Because of this, society views the Hulk as a bad thing that needs to be contained. This causes Banner to hate the Hulk side of him and to wish it wasn't there. The Hulk is not a bad thing, he ends up saving the day at the end of the movie; but since society deems him as terrible, he ends up believing it just like the Breedloves did. Tony Stark, however, does not view the Hulk as a terrible monster. He, in fact, views him as an asset. When Tony compliments him on being the Hulk, Banner accepts the compliment very lightly because he doesn't believe it. Tony manages to convince Banner by the end of the movie that the Hulk might actually be a good thing. That is the difference between Banner and the Breedloves, Banner had someone to convince him that society is wrong to make him believe that the Hulk is a bad thing. Maybe if the Breedloves had their own Tony Stark, things would have ended differently.
This week, we read a few chapters in The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. The whole book is about how women's beauty standards affect women but while I was reading it, I started thinking about the societal standards for men. In doing so, I realized that those standards had a huge impact on Steve Roger's (Captain America) life.
Back before Captain America was Captain America, he was a short, unusually skinny man from Brooklyn, New York. Before the procedure, girls ignored him. After the procedure, girls loved him. Everything stayed the same except one thing, his body. In order for a man to be considered handsome in society, they have to be tall and muscular. Steve Rogers is the total opposite of this standard so it is no surprise that he is having trouble finding a girl.
In the picture to the left, it is clear that this women really likes Steve. However, if he had walked into that room before the procedure, the women would have totally ignored him. Even though this movie takes place in the 1940s, this standard still exists today. There aren't very many movies where the main character is a short, skinny man or a man that is on the heavier side. Also, there aren't really any magazines with pictures of men that aren't tall, muscular, and tan. It is sad that society cares more about someone's physical appearance than their personality.
