A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

Chap. II. The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed
Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman is possibly the most well-known feminist treatise of our time, and because it was the first truly feminist work of literature she is accredited as being the mother of the feminist movement. The main theme of this chapter shows Mary's observance of the practice of her time which was to have women that yielded and became mere coquettes to men. She observed how, in her time, women were merely educated in the rights of manners while men were educated of the world. Ms. Wollstonecraft also refutes many poets and authors including the famous Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as Dr. John Gregory in observing the necessity for mankind to tear itself away from the old ideals expressed by these two men (those of women not being educated and becoming the pawns of "tyrants" and "sensualists") and recognize women on the same standard as men, as valued intellectuals. As Mary shows throughout the chapter, she doesn't want just for women to have equal social and political rights with men, but she wants a whole new view on women to be fastened to the minds of society. In saying this, she recognizes that she may be asking for a "Utopian" principle when asking for total integration of the female race into the intellectual world, but nevertheless she was way ahead of her time in introducing this wholly new ideal. Also, Mary recognizes the difference between friendship and love and quotes a "shrewd satirist" in saying "that rare as true love is, true friendship is still rarer", which shows her opinion that men and women should not marry for mere love (which she labels more as desire and passion) but, using reason, should match for friendship and find each other companions, here would lie the only answer for immortal love. Finally, Mary closes with the argument in which she began in saying that society should accept this truly healthy ideal of bringing women into the intellectual world because "as sound politics diffuse liberty, mankind, including woman, will become more wise and virtuous."
Mary's Vindication brings up to me a question, have we as a truly more enlightened and intellectual society, more than two hundred years later integrated women fully into the intellectual world, or are they still stuck as being pawns of man's desire? The answer to me is quite bluntly no. Even though we find, in our world today, brilliant women at the head of our science industries, teaching in the best universities across the globe, and becoming leading figures in many nations' governments, women are still found to be sexually exploited in movies, television shows, and especially advertisements. This exploitation brings to me a second question of will attractive young women ever be looked at as more than just sexual objects put to good use selling merchandise and movie tickets? For me, at least at the present moment the answer is still a resounding no. As long as our society can subjugate women, and these young women allow it to happen, women will not reach the full integration into our intellectual society that Ms. Wollstonecraft was wishing for two hundred years ago.

Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr

(Below: Persistence of Time by Salvador Dali )

In this essay, Nicholas Carr poses the question of whether or not websites such as Google, the Internet and computers in general are making us less intelligent. Carr opens with the observation that the more time he and many of the people he interviewed spent on the computer, it became harder for them to stay focused and think about a long essay and/or book while reading it. Because I don't really spend that much time on the computer (other than that spent on maintaining this blog) I hadn't really noticed this happening to me, but I can see where his point of view is coming from. Nicholas then puts up an opinion that these problems being experienced with focus may be caused by the fact that when one is on the Internet there is a "staccato quality" to the facts and information that one is observing (only taking in the main points), so when one goes to read a long book or article, he/she ends up skimming it for the main points automatically. What I took out of this and what I've observed with sites such as Google, Wikipedia, etc., is that these sites are making it easy for us to find out facts and answers without having to obtain conclusions for ourselves, leaving out all of the details of the situation and succumbing us to a sort-of spoon-fed literacy. As Nicholas points out psychologist Maryanne Wolf shows that we are not only "what we read" but "we are how we read", meaning that if we skim over the Internet, we are bound to skim over a book or article. Another good point that Mr. Carr brought up was that of an observation made by one of Friedrich Nietzsche's good friends, who noticed that Nietzsche's writing style became "tighter (and) more telegraphic" as Nietzsche switched from writing with pen and paper to writing with a typewriter. From what I've observed, this is most likely because when one is writing with pen and paper they are expending more effort than it takes to type on a typewriter or computer, so one in turn thinks about and explores what one is writing. Later in the article, I was intrigued by when Mr. Carr observed the movement in the 14th century from life without the mechanical clock to life with mechanical clocks. He then quotes Joseph Weizenbaum who observes how when the mechanical clock came around "we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock" in our daily lives, in effect become slaves to schedules and time. This is a very scary idea to me because it is true that time has come to control society, everything that we do tends to run on a schedule, leaving the clock, not us, in control of our lives. Then, Nicholas brings up the idea of, starting in the Industrial Revolution, men becoming machines. He observes how it all started with Frederick Winslow Taylor who made an "algorithm" to calculate what workers at a machinery factor must do in order to keep productivity at a maximum, looking at men like they were machines themselves. Also, Mr. Carr looks at the subject of this article, Google, and how, in their own words, they are striving to "build artificial intelligence" that may, in the future replace peoples' brains! This to me seems like a joke, I mean it is just absurd that anyone would want to replace human thought with "the perfect search engine", in effect devaluing human consciousness and existence in general. To add to this thought, they are overlooking the idea that if these artificial brains replaced our own, the machines would be our consciousness, living our lives for us, and we would become the machines or the vehicles necessary for the artificial brains to survive. It all sounds like a sci-fi movie gone wrong to me, and I believe it is completely bogus. Finally, I thought the main thing to take out of this article was a quote by playwright Richard Foreman at the end of the article, stating that as we move from spoken and written information to Internet streaming we are becoming "pancake people-spread wide and thin", meaning as we open ourselves to this vast amount of information, we come to know a lot but not a lot about what we know.

Skunk Dreams by Louise Erdrich

In general, I loved Louise's writing style and admire how she uses metaphors and detailed descriptions to express her encounters with skunks and wildlife. Also, I thought that she brought up some good questions that I've been struggling with. First, she brought up a quote by David H. Lund that asks the question of what reality is. He says that in a dream reality is the image made that one's unconscious is living and that you perceive the dream world as being real. Then she brings up the idea of how this could constitute reason for there being an afterlife, because one's (unconscious) self might be able to 'live' on after the conscious self (what our brain perceives as ourselves as were are alive) dies. My personal opinion on this topic is that our conscious selves (brains) cannot perceive their own demise (you cannot perceive not perceiving) so our mind needs an excuse for living on, which ends in theories of the after-life, reincarnation, and the list goes on. The next interesting topic that Ms. Erdrich brings up is that of the phenomena of Déjà vu. She tells a story about how she dreamed of a herd of elk and then ran into the same herd in real life. I have been struggling with this phenomena as well because I have had multiple occurrence where I would dream of being in a situation (or at least thought I did) and then ran right into the situation days, weeks or months later. Some experts say that these dreams stimulate our unconscious to guide us towards making them 'real' in our conscious lives and this is what has tended to make the most sense for me. The problem is that no one can control their unconscious (as many hypnotist around the world show). Another interesting question that she quoted from British psychotherapist Adam Phillips is the question of "whether obstacles create desire or desire creates obstacle". Personally, I believe that it's both, because in some situations obstacles make one want to work for something, while in other situations one wants something and because of this obstacles are created along the path to achieve that goal. A good example would be becoming an Olympian: I could just go to swim practice and do my normal routine and end up as an Olympian by fate or I could strive to become an Olympian and put in extra effort, meeting obstacles such as time constraints on practicing. Finally, one of my favorite parts of this essay is when Louise states that "the obstacles that we overcome define us." This is a wonderful statement of life in general, which I interpreted that our conscious actions and experiences define what our life is and has been and is going to be and who we are or are perceived to be.

The Talk Of The Town Part II

Susan Santag on World Trade Center Bombings:
In this article, Susan opens with a rather pessimistic, but understandable view on the reactions of the politicians and the mass media after the events of September 11, 2001. She is "depressed" at the rather hot-headed accusations made by the press and the Politicians, when calling the terrorists cowards, as well as their deception when stating America's candor. She also states that such "reality-concealing rhetoric" is "unworthy of mature democracy". Finally, she closes with the opinion that, sure America's strong (obviously, we are the number one nuclear power in the world and control the United Nations), but "that's not all America has to be".
While I am not quite sure what Ms. Santag means by her last statement "that's not all America has to be", I do agree with her, as of late, about the deception of the press and Politicians "unworthy of democracy". Ever since the Watergate Scandal of 1972, it seems that the press has made a shift and is becoming more and more biased. This curve towards total bias steepened exponentially in the last presidential race between John McCain and Barack Obama. It was shown that most of the news reporters and anchormen and women of many stations including NBC, ABC, CBS, as well as and especially MSNBC were openly biased towards the Democratic Party. Walter Cronkite, before his death, even stated in an interview how disgusted he was at the Media for not doing it's job and showing open bias on stories such as the election. Finally, pure democracy shows a sway from left to right on the political spectrum while keeping balanced, but because of the recent economic crisis the government has swayed further left than has ever happened before, leaving me wondering, will it ever balance itself out again or has the scale and our democracy broken at last?

The Talk Of The Town Part I

Adam Gopnik on Virginia Tech Massacre:
When Adam opened his essay with the information about the dead students' cell phones ringing as they were carried out of the school, I was taken aback and drawn in at the same time. It made me think of all the petite tragedies that occur during these events that make the reader feel sick inside. He then went on to talk about how everyone talks about restricting guns or waging war after events such as this when all that should happen, at least initially, is a healing process. But the answer to this is quite obvious, because the mass media reacts to the emotions of the public. If the public is angry at the killer, the media looks up information on (in this case) his mental health, trying to degrade and tarnish him as much as they can. If the public is angry at gun control laws, or perhaps even the vendor, the media looks at the laws and the vendor and fuels a biased movement in order to appease public opinion. Adam also talks about how the same goes for the government and politicians who must unsuccessfully (until Obama's presidency) appease both sides of the political spectrum, causing stagnation and little legislation to be passed. Finally, when Mr. Gopnik talks about how the reasoning for restrictions on assault weapons in America is simple, and that nations that have restrictions on such weapons do not come close to America's gun violence, I would have to agree and disagree. I agree that restricting assault weapons would help with the majority of potential killers, but there is still a good amount of such people that could and would easily be able to attain these weapons illegally. Also, when he talks about killings with rifles and shotguns being "exceptions" I have to disagree with him, because of (among other events) the Red Lake Indian Reservation shootings of 2005. This event occurred when a troubled teenager stole his grandfather's shotgun, killed his grandparents, a security guard at his High School, a teacher and five students, as well as himself.

About Myself

My name is Peter Grenzow and I am a current student of McFarland High School, enrolling as a Senior next fall. The blogs that I will be posting on this particular blog will pertain to my Advanced Placement Composition class and will contain material about some well-known books and essays both recent and somewhat out-dated. I will strive to put my best foot forward as I blog about my thoughts on these pieces of literature.