Gatsby and the Fundamental Decencies

When reading the first few pages of The Great Gatsby, I was struck by a certain statement on page 2, the narrator's notion that "a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth". My curiosity was peaked when I read this quote because I have occasionally wondered if a concept like that were the truth. At first it seems irrational, but when you think about it we are all different and we each have a different "sense of the fundamental decencies" (assuming that my understanding of this phrase is correct). Some people are more kind than others, some are more athletic, some are more intelligent. This is not to say that some people are somehow better than others, but merely that we are all unique and our skills and talents all lie in different areas. When I began thinking about the meaning of this quote, I googled the passage to see what others had said about it. I was led to a Yahoo Answers page where the general consensus was that the narrator was stating that "rich people are born with better ethics/morals/outlook than poor people". I have not read more than a few pages of the book so far, so I cannot say for sure if this is or isn't the narrator's overall point of view, but at least at this point I don't feel that this is at all what he is saying. He is not saying that a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth, favoring wealthy people, or that those with a better sense of these decencies will end up being wealthy. In fact, in this statement, wealth is not brought up at all. But maybe I'm just missing something.

Remix Culture

I have just finished watching two films, one a lecture by lawrence lessig titled "Keeping Culture Free" (here) and a documentary called RiP: Remix Manifesto which follows Girl Talk and Lessig, looking at remix culture around the world (here). Both of these films were immensely interesting and I have learned much more than I had expected to about copyright law and the restrictions it tries to place on the remix and sampling of media. Girl talk, a musician who creates songs by taking small samples of many songs and combining them, has not been able to release an album because of the great risk of being sued by the companies that own the rights to the media he samples. These presentations often focused on the idea that culture always builds upon itself, and restricting artists ability to use the culture they could build on is a hindrance on culture in general. One example that struck me was Disney. RiP: Remix Manifesto used Disney as an example of culture building upon itself because of the way movies like Snow White, Cinderella, and Alice in Wonderland were all modern remakes of fairy tales. The difference in this case, however, is how Disney copyrighted these works and the characters in them so that nobody could build upon what they had built upon. They also were able to get copyright law extended greatly, so that their exclusive access to these fairy tales would last even longer.

Eyes on the Prize

I was listening to more of Macklemore's music and one line from the chorus stuck out to me, "Each moment's precious, don't let life pass you by, keep focused keep your eyes on the prize." Of course, this line stuck out because of the phrase "eyes on the prize" which happened to be the name of the documentary we recently watched in class. I realize that this connection is merely a coincidence, but it gives me a chance to point out some more of Macklemore's lyrics that are relevant to the topics we have been discussing in class, civil rights and equality. In one of his songs, Claiming The City, he talks about the problems in his city, Seattle, that were around when he grew up but he hopes will be improved by the time his children are "claiming the city". He talks about growing up with two parents and two cars and then realizing when he was older that most people did not grow up like him when he found out "there was something called a social status and my black friends weren't in my financial bracket". He also says that although he went to a diverse school, the city is still "divided neighborhood to neighborhood". In my opinion one of the most powerful lines in the song is, "to think that we claim that so much has changed since Brown vs. the Board of Education and Roe vs. Wade, but around my way it all stays the same, they just figured out a way to separate the black and white race"

The Power of Education

Recently we have been working on a project that focuses on thinking up an alternative way that reconstruction could have gone that would have been more successful. One of the sections of reconstruction and freedman integration into American society that I believe could have improved the whole scenario if it was more prevalent is education. In the modern day, education is a topic that has been in the news frequently and was addressed by President Obama during his State of the Union address. I've been thinking about why this is and why education is seen as so important by most people. This lead me to recalling a phrase, "if you give a man a fish he eats for a day, if you teach him how to fish he eats for life". This concept can be applied to how I think reconstruction should have gone, with education as the biggest priority. When we consider ways that reconstruction could have been revised, it may seem like a good idea at first to have given freedmen money or payment for their many years of working with no pay. However, I think it would have been a much better idea to use that money to give them access to a first-class education. It is my belief that the majority of problems and struggles of freedmen such as sharecropping and racism would have been solved or avoided by offering them the same access to education right from the start as the white people received.

White Privilege

During Mondays class we talked briefly about the Grammys. We had been discussing the portrayal of black people in the media and performance before that, and the two topics relate heavily. A lot of the portrayals that I listed during Friday's class about black people in the media came from my exposure to rap music and the "masks" that many black rappers use to attract listeners. All these discussions reminded me of a song titled "White Privilege" made by one of my favorite rappers, a white rapper called Macklemore. The song talks about how white rappers like himself are essentially invading the rap culture created by black people, and the importance of recognizing that although "good music is good music regardless of what you look like" it "doesn't change the fact that this culture's not mine" (lyrics from White Privilege, read all the lyrics here). He talks about how hip hop was created to counteract the struggles of being black in a horribly racist society, a struggle that he's never been through. He also mentions an idea that I have observed in the past but never really thought much of. The fact that the majority of fans at rap concerts tend to be white, even if the performer is black. Thinking back about the times I saw Kanye West and Nas & Damien Marley, I definitely recall seeing this. I would say the audience was at least 80-90% white, and seeing as the concerts were both in Chicago, that is not the ratio you would expect to see. I also noticed this line in the song, which I liked: "we still owe them 40 acres now we've stolen their 16 bars"

Holy Cows

Mr. Bolos used the term "sacred cows" to describe the areas of government spending that are nearly impossible to reduce without receiving extensive criticism. These areas include Medicare, Social Security, and National Defense. This description helped me put a term to something that I had noticed while watching the State of the Union address. President Obama proposed that "annual domestic spending" be frozen for the next 5 years. This seemed to me like it may have been a move to reduce spending on one of the sacred cows, so I was intrigued. I did not fully understand what was meant by domestic spending, so I researched what the freeze entailed. It turns out the freeze really just meant that the salaries of government employees could not go up for 5 years, and the government could only use the currently available funds for domestic projects rather than increasing budgets. I also saw that the spending that this freeze affects makes up only of 13% of the U.S. budget, and therefore does not touch any of the aforementioned sacred cows. The fact that this spending freeze, although it may seem major, does not affect the sacred cows shows how powerful they really are. Although President Obama is making a great effort to show that he is making strides towards reducing spending, he still understands that the sacred cows cannot be touched.

Meta-Blog 2

Looking over this quarter in blog posts, I find that there is one thing my best posts have in common, something concrete that I based them off of. This could be a quote, a websight, or an event in my life. It seems that the bigger the connection I have to the topic of my blog, the better I can write and the more comfortable I am while actually writing the post. Something else I have noticed is that my two most recent posts were based off of opinions I hold that I would not commonly be willing to commit to publishing. However, my extensive use of the blog system over the last semester has made me more comfortable with publishing my opinions even though I understand that not everybody will agree with the things I say. I feel like being able to publish more one-sided posts as apposed to posts that simply bring up a question and support both sides is an improvement. I am actually starting to like the blog medium, because I am realizing how often I see something in everyday life that I hold an opinion about that I would like to share. All in all, I am definitely becoming more comfortable with the concept of blogging frequently. Quite honestly, I hadn't really seen myself as likely to use a blog, but I am finding out that the freedom of blogging can be very intriguing.