Eng 169: Without Sanctuary

(In reference to withoutsanctuary.org and Native Son, p. 276)

Studying these photographs has engendered in me an even deeper disappointment in the depth of feeling of the average American than I had previously held. Two facts contribute to this. The first is that I am quite sure many people, myself included, experienced a greater deal of shock upon actually viewing the images than they may have previously only experienced in textual form. The second is that this greater level of "shock" was probably not, in fact, that great. This is to say that we have developed increasingly an attitude that forces us to "see it to believe it," and furthermore, through our gross exposure to graphic imagery through various media, we have become rather accustomed to images of the dead, of hatred, and of extreme violence. Truth be told, this is a rather sad state to experience: one where feelings cannot be esoterically felt, but must be exoterically indicated in order to be recognized as valid by the general public.

A passage from Native Son sheds a helpful amount of light on this notion by indicating that our increased mechanization as people correlates tightly (not to mention disturbingly) to our increased tolerance of violence. In the passage, Wright claims that Bigger "sensed that in their attitude toward him they had gone beyond hate," that "not only had they resolved to put him to death," but that they had reduced him to a mere symbol of anyone who ever had and ever would find themselves in his situation. Naturally, the argument could be made that in regarding him as a symbol, the white folks in Native Son are in fact elevating Bigger. I would like to emphasize that this is not the case. By "raising" him to a symbolic level, they are in fact stripping him of his humanity, denying themselves the opportunity to empathize with him because he, in his symbolic state, no longer shares that humanity with them.

I have seen probably hundreds of dead bodies between the movies and television. I have even seen a fair few in real life. Consistently I, as well as many others, have failed to attach any meaningful emotional weight to these former people, and have reduced them to the symbolic state I have just described, where I am unable to identify with them, and their only purpose is to fill whatever role they occupy, be it "bad guy," or "lady on the stretcher at the nursing home." I fail to make any sort of genuine connection, and pass by with little or no thought concerning the person's family, home, occupation, or any other detail. We have adopted the guiltless mentality of soldiers, where for each bomb we watch dropped on television, we have numbed ourselves (or, one could argue, we have been numbed) to not think of whoever might be inside the building being hit. Of course, it would be ridiculous to claim that we should cease from viewing television, movies, or the internet for fear of being emotionally diluted by their violent content, but it would not be ridiculous to point out our emotional handicap, and claim that we should act in such a way that recognizes it and compensates for it.

Greetings

So, by means of mandatory assignment through an English class here at the UW, I have finally been lured into the world of web-logging. While I've done my best to avoid it to this point, I suppose I'll make the best of it. In addition to the assignments for said class, I'll do my best to post essays I've written that are a bit more pertinent to the issues concerning the general internet-audience, rather than using this bit of cyberspace exclusively to address issues arising in books by Toni Morrison, et all, that while quite good and highly reccommended from me, you (all) may not have read.

For the ease of use by my classmates and teaching assistant, I will be sure to indicate which posts fall under the "scholastic" and "general" readership categories. I just don't want to let this log go to waste as a mere academic necessity: I'd like to, as much as possible, turn it into the cyber-analogy of a gritty basement room in which I sit smoking a cigarette under a single lightbulb typing angry letters to the government on an archaic mechanical typwriter. You know, the kind of place an eccentric wannabe artisan can call "home."

So welcome to my humble cyber-abode (for those of you in my English class: yes, I am quite aware that was a fragment, and should be revised). Hopefully I'll post something interesting at some point, but perhaps not. Either way, I'm stuck here to expel my rants, raves, thoughts, musings, postulations, jokes, frustrations, praises, and opinions with all the sound and fury one could hope to see expelled from a neurotic, over-analytical 19-year-old with no academic credentials whatsoever.

Of course, we all know what Chomsky said about academic credentials anyway...