The Shocking State of Present Narrative Styling

The Godfather, often considered one of history’s greatest movies, with a complex but elegant plot it serves as a true showing of impressive story structure.  In contrast Saturday Night Live may well be among the causes of the destruction of quality narratives.  NBC’s Saturday Night Live has, to its credit, been a springboard for comedic careers since its inception in 1975, but perhaps its most impressive legacy is the popularization of sketch based comedy through the medium of television.  The idea of sketch based comedy is the antithesis of narrative story arcs, with most sketches being brief jabs at aspects of society.  It is this lack of continuity in story and narrative that that Rushkoff posits, has caused “television to lose its ability to tell stories over time” (Rushkoff 22).  Among the more popular of sketch comedy series in the modern era are South Park, Family guy, and Key and Peele, all of which have done some degree of harm to the narrative traditions of movies like the Godfather.

              Both Family Guy and South Park represent a half hour (commercials included) of content, with a story.  But the important thing to note is that the episodes are largely contained, with each one having a relatively limited story arc. The typical episode will contain a heavily condensed and simplified version of the hero’s journey, but will run very quickly through the individual parts and at points somewhat or entirely disregarding the journey to interject a cultural reference of negligible importance to what plot may exist.  Though it is still important to note, as it will be contrasted to later, the fact that there is a continuity in the way characters are portrayed, as they maintain the same physical and character traits.  This sort of construction, with a haphazard creation of background to the story creates what Rushkoff refers to as “something more like putting together a puzzle by making connections and recognizing patterns” than an actual narrative system (34).

              Though even this sort of partial narrative is more than exists in a true sketch comedy like Key and Peele.  This Comedy Central show saw a massive degree of success both critically and commercially.  The show however was still entirely sketch based.  Sketches could be five minutes long, or just over a minute.  In a sketch with only one minute of story there was almost no room to create any sort of arc. The steps of a hero’s journey are almost entirely eliminated, and substituted by the minimum aspects required for people to understand or laugh at jokes.  Background, and setting have to be judged by the audience member in the fractions of seconds before the dialogue starts off.  In the next few seconds the audience must quickly evaluate the characters who begin to talk, who the characters may be satirizing, and what relationship they may have to each other.  And so on with every few seconds the audience having to switch mental focus.  That in and of itself yields weight to the fixation on presentism, as all parts are rapid fire, giving little time for the audience’s minds to access the broader implications of the sketch.  But the other aspect of sketch shows that further reinforces presentism is the episode structure.  There is not one sketch per episode.  There is not a consistent set of characters.  There is often not a single aspect shared between one sketch and the next.  This type of episode structure is in sharp contrast to the way in which South Park, or Family Guy would function.  With this sort of self contained sketches rather than just self contained episodes, the problems posed by Family Guy and South Park like shows are only magnified by the condensed time format.

              To conclude, the ability to convey narratives and stories is under assault.  With ever more condensed and presentist shows taking more of the public’s attention it seems that stories and shows with defined beginnings middles and ends are becoming less and less important.  With that it seems clear that our culture has become all the more susceptible to Present Shock.

Rushkoff, Douglass. Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. New York: Penguin, 2013. Print.

An Ernest Appraisal of Style

            In a Movable Feast Hemingway presents an important insight into his style of writing, and how those elements of style can engross the reader in a story.  The most striking elements of Hemingway's style were the subtle uses of second person, and the vivid imagery.  The latter of the two is prevalent whenever Hemingway writes about someone or something.  Every initial interaction he has with an artist or author within the novel begins approximately the same way.  The first step in Hemingway's description is of the individuals is the physical features, which Hemingway describes in great detail, integrating similes, and other devices to enable the reader to see the situations and people just as he remembered them.  The descriptions then generally move to focus on the character of a person.  This element of Hemingway's description paints as in depth of a picture of the person as his description of their physical features, but rounds out a holistic view of the individual by including Hemingway's memory of how the person acted.  Together the descriptions leave little to the minds of the reader which reveals how this element of Hemingway's style allows for the people he portrays to be seen nearly uniformly in the minds of all the readers.

            Perhaps a greater element of Hemingway's style is the use of second person.  The novel is largely written in the first person, as to be expected since it is effectively a memoir.  However, portions of the book subtly integrate second person.  Hemingway explains gambling’s impact on his financial situation by stating,

“But we had made plenty of money, big money for us, and now we had spring and money too. I thought that was all we needed. A day like that one, if you split the winnings one quarter for each to spend, left a half for racing capital. I kept the racing capital secret and apart from all other capital” (Hemingway 59).

It is easy to miss the use of “you” in the excerpt, but its impact as an element of style is present whether you recognize its presence or not.  That impact being a subtle shift in the mindset of the reader, making him or her feel more like a part of the story, rather than just an outsider looking in.

            In conclusion the reasoning behind reading this book was to see a stellar example of the ways in which writing style can impact the way a reader perceives the characters within a novel, and how style can help draw a reader into a story.

Works cited

Hemingway, Ernest.  A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 2009. Print.

Common Core

It has been around twenty years since Niel Postman declared that Economic Utility was, “the preeminent reason for schooling” (Postman 27).  However time has not changed the goal of the American education system, though it has impacted some of its mechanisms.  In the early twenty first century the United States have become increasingly dominated by the new idea of standardized testing.  Though to be totally clear the SAT and AP classes have been around for quite some time, the sheer number of tests has reached a peak in the twenty first century.  The cause behind the swing towards standardized testing was spurred on by legislation commonly referred to as Common Core.  The legislation and resulting tests were well intended, with members of both parties hoping to increase the standards for achievement for all states in the United States by making sure that a student in the Bronx, and one from Topeka, Kansas would learn the same exact things.

The attempts to regulate a national standard for learning is, however, reliant on a system to compare students nationwide, the chosen, and likely only reasonable method, was standardized testing.  In states that take part in common core, or those that wish to have statewide tests, standardized testing is commonplace, with multiple standardized tests per class per year.  The emphasis on tests as well as the monetary importance placed on them has resulted in the phenomena of teaching to the test.  This would be fine as long as the standardized tests could test everything that was taught in a subject, however that is sadly not currently the state.   As a result some teachers and schools focus only on subject matter in the tests themselves, excluding the material that is a part of the required learning but not tested at the end of the year.  This is in many cases not too harmful, but in some subjects that require an intimate knowledge of the previous class in order to achieve in the next one, it results in students being woefully under prepared, effectively harming their ability to complete future courses, therefore serving to create more disparities in education rather than fix them.

Postman, Niel. The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New York, Random House, 1996. Print.

Plato and Postman, a unified view on modern America

            Plato was not only a philosopher but a political theorist as well.  His ideal government was one where “the state should be governed by philosophers” (Gaarder 91).  His theory was presented in ancient Greece, since then there have been many governments classified by the name republic.  The most notable republic may well be the United States, founded by well-educated philosophers, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.  Since then however there appears to have been a shift in how American government functions.  Niel Postman explains that “the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is a television commercial” (Postman 126).  This description of the modern American republic is in sharp contrast to Plato’s intended style of government. 

            These differences between modern American attitudes and the thoughts of Plato are also distinct in our style of news.  Plato was one of the most notable students of Socrates, and was heavily influenced by Socrates practice of asking questions and feigning ignorance.  In contrast the American approach is largely to never ask questions, and be ignorant.  This approach is personified in television news, or perhaps more accurately television newsertainment.  This newsertainment breaks the meaningful dialogue people can pursue as Postman explains,

“There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly—for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening—that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, ‘Now . . . this’” (Postman 99).

Effectively when a newscaster says “now this” the flow of information is ended, and any thought, question or view that a listener might have begun to formulate is likely terminated.  The now this phenomena has also killed another aspect of the Socratic system of dialogue using rational thought.  The death to rational thought comes about in response to the shorter news segments, that give only partial information with little context, thus making it impossible to truly make any rational conclusions.  In short if Plato could see today he may very well gravitate towards a similar view as that posited by Niel Postman.

Works Cited

Postman, Niel. Amusing ourselves to death Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New                       York: Penguin Group, 2006. Print.

Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie’s World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print

To The Chagrin of Chomsky

            In a mix of lofty idealism and nonsensical conclusions, Noam Chomsky attempts to project his view of 9/11, and the actions thereafter.  Professor Chomsky posits three examples of American exceptionalism.  First, Chomsky equates the terrorist attacks carried out against the US as akin to American moves to stabilize Chile by aiding the Pinochet regime.  Second, the he argues for the trial of Osama Bin Laden, and that there should have been extra efforts to take him alive.  Last, Chomsky makes claim that the United States in taking military action in Afghanistan had violated international law.  In each case however there are glaring oversights that are to be analyzed.

            The first 9/11 as Chomsky describes was the United States helping Pinochet seize power.  However there are key differences in the “terror attack” the US committed, and the terror attack against it.  The death toll of the 9/11 attacks was upwards of 2,950 civilians, not government officials, counter coup leaders or soldiers, but unarmed civilians.  Instead Pinochet’s coup was the select imprisonment and removal of Marxist leaders, and allowing the military to take power.  The government Pinochet replaced was by no means lawful.  As Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard explains, “prior to the coup d’état, the Chilean Supreme Court denounced the Allende government’s disruption of the legality of the nation in its failure to uphold judicial decisions.”  When the United States sent aid to Pinochet, they were aiding an economically liberal, and legally minded faction in a nation undergoing a rapid shift to a communist regime.  At this point it becomes paramount to explain the core differences in the theories of idealism and realism.  Idealism is the theory that things can become the ideal, and that there can be paths with no downsides in both foreign policy and domestic policy.  In contrast to the impossible to achieve idealism there is realism, which takes into account all parts of a situation and attempts to weigh the harms and benefits to find a net beneficial and achievable course of action.  The view that Pinochet was holistically a harmful character to the Chilean nation is an example of the lofty idealism so prevalent in Chomsky’s essay.  In many ways Pinochet saved Chile, he prompted a period of rapid economic growth, stabilized the country (through admittedly less than peaceful means), and peacefully handed power back to a democracy, all while maintaining massive approval from the population he governed.  In no way was this regime change akin to the US committing the mass murder of civilians for no reason but shear hatred of their ideas and people, which was the motivation of Al-Qaeda in their 9/11.

            Second, Chomsky presents that the United States should have pursued a trial in court rather, and made extra effort to capture Osama Bin Laden.  Chomsky makes the claim that if only the US had tried to extradite Bin Laden from Afghanistan it would have worked.  Two problems emerge with the claim, first the US had already attempted to extradite Bin Laden and failed, second there were issues in geography.  First as the United Nations notes in resolution 1333,

“Noting the indictment of Usama bin Laden and his associates by the United States of America for, inter alia, the 7 August 1998 bombings of the United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and for conspiring to kill American nationals outside the United States, and noting also the request of the United States of America to the Taliban to surrender them for trial.” 

So in fact it was quite clear how the Taliban was likely to respond, they were not likely to extradite post 9/11 if they weren’t before.  Next, Chomsky seems to forget the infrastructure, politics, and geography of Afghanistan.  The infrastructure of Afghanistan is to say the least poor, and around 2001 even worse.  The politics of Afghanistan were by no means unified, individual factions of ethnic, religious, and tribal origins controlled large portions of the country.  As a result even if the Taliban decided to try and extradite Bin Laden, he could likely have gone to a place out of their effective control.  Lastly the Afghan nation is crisscrossed by a number of mountain ranges, allowing for Bin Laden to hide effectively against the Taliban if they searched for him.  Moreover though the Nurnberg trials set a legal precedent for armed, uniformed combatants.  In other words the legal precedent of giving a terrorist the right to trial did not exist from the post WWII trial.  In practical matters as well, an explicit order to kill Bin Laden was more effective, as keeping him for trial would only further motivate radicals and fanatics endangering Americans at home and abroad.

            Finally Chomsky makes claim that the United States had violated international law by taking military action in Afghanistan.  It is important to note that international law is derived from the United Nations, and in the UN charter article 51 any state is given the right to self-defense, clarifying that, “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.” By even the most relaxed standards the killing of 2977 persons is an attack.  The role of the Taliban in protecting and supporting the leadership of the group that committed the attack made them guilty by association.  Therefore, the US under the most explicit of international treaties, the UN charter, the United States had the right to self-defense.  However the United States actions were even further supported by international law as evidenced by UN resolution 1373 where the security council, “Reaffirming the need to combat by all means, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts,” within that statement the US was granted the right to combat threats to peace and security, which were constituted by terrorist groups including the Taliban.  Once again it would appear that Chomsky’s ideals fail to equate to the reality of international law, since within both the UN charter and later resolutions countries were given the blessing of the UN to protect their security.  So instead of breaking international law, the US actions were well within the bounds of UN law.  Another important failing of Chomsky is to recognize the fact that the United States was not invading but backing Hamid Karzai and his forces.  Hamid Karzai was the acting leader of Afghanistan post 2001, and as such his approval of American troops to continue eliminating terrorist threats in Afghanistan served to finally remove any legal question about the American intervention on behalf of the Northern alliance.

            To conclude, Chomsky’s theory that America omitted itself from following the rules was far from true, his historical example of Pinochet, overblown, his theory of international law, misguided, his view on legal precedent, faulty. 


Works Cited
Brown, Lewis. Guilty economics? Friedman, Pinochet and Chile. Event Panel. City of London: Center for Policy Studies, 2012. Document

United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, 24 October 1945. Web. 9 September 2015.

Security Council resolution 1333, S/RES/1333 (19 December 2000)

The Evolution of Language

Evolution is by its very nature the constant change of something.  Language is no different, and in the new age dominated by computers and the internet, language is changing faster than ever before.  Yet, the broad changes in the English language, ushered in by the emergence of new outlets for the written word, have been dubbed by some a devolution.  In reality the English language has just entered a new era.  Foremost it is important to note something about the English language, it is and has been used in a number of different ways.

First, the English language has been used to express very basic things.  Take for example a greeting, “hello, how are you?” this statement would be considered by critics of modern changes to language, a proper greeting, whereas a more modern form for example “What’s up?” would be considered devolved.  However, it is important to view the context of both of these statements, not in terms of conversation, but technology.  In the former example, there are four words and five syllables, in the latter there are two words two syllables.  In other words the latter statement is more streamlined, which is a case similar to most shorthand used in texting or other means of basic communication.  This simplification has mirrored a change in how streamlined communication has become.  With the increasing rate with which people can transfer information, there becomes a response in the English language, where there become quicker ways to express the same meaning, by removing excess verbiage.  Between quicker transfers, and shorter writing there is room for what will be referred to as, informal unnecessary updates.   These informal unnecessary updates, are instances where someone will, for example, declare how much they enjoy the food they are eating with something like, “OMG this is gr8”.  To most people this would register as a devolution of language, as the words written and then distributed by text, social media, or other method, have little meaning.  To that response, it is important to note that statements like the one mentioned above, are nothing new to the English language.  The only change is that the medium, and number of people it will reach.  In prior eras it was equally likely for someone to exclaim their enjoyment of food, however the number of people reached by these words has extended from the people sitting around the table, to anyone with access to, the most modern of mediums, the internet.  In short informal language is evolving with technology, becoming more like short hand, however what is being expressed hasn’t changed in content only in medium.

Second, formal language has also seen changes to its usage.  To critics of modern day changes to language, the main problems that they find are in the aforementioned informal unnecessary updates, and they pay little attention to formal language.  In formal language evolution has also taken place.  The creation of the internet has made the publishing of intellectual papers easier to access.  In reaction these papers have become more simplistic in their wording, to reach a broader audience.  However simple is not necessarily a bad thing, as certain thinkers including George Orwell had explained, there was an inherent problem with formal papers in the not too distant past, that problem being that it was to excessive in verbiage.  In some instances words with little meaning or purpose to a sentence would be added in order to make the statement seem more intellectual or complex, luckily these extra words are being combated by the evolution of the internet as a medium, and the resulting desire to cut excessive complexity and verbiage to make it more accessible to the common person.

In conclusion, although these changes to language don’t seem gr8 at first, they are just another step in the endless evolution of the English language, ushered in by a new medium, and characterized by streamlined communication.