" From ww2.Cold war counter culture--political performance art--uses Eisenhower language in poetry as a subversive tool."America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing.""I used to be a communist when I was a kid. I'm not sorry.""I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
"--exemplifies departure from old left and bridge to new left. "Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?" "Them Russians and them Chinamen."--critisizing "them" rhetoric as being fear based. Ginsberg hails back to Whitman with the long lined verse and his embracement of everyone and everything
" 'It is the innocent which constitute the crime." "There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them." "You know and I know, that the country is celebrating 100 years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free." Down at the Cross: "I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous.
"(sheltered from reality by the church) "White people in this country will have enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this--which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never --the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed." "The paradox-- and a fearful paradox it is--is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one' past--one's history---is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it."The Fire Next Time opens with a six to seven page dedicatory letter to his nephew and namesake James, entitled in short "On the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.
" Baldwin advises his nephew on how to deal with the racist world in which he was born. In spite the horrors of America, Baldwin believed the Negro must take the high road and show whites, in their ignorance and innocence, how to live the good life, how to love.He concludes his letter of encouragement with these remarks.It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.
. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest since Homer. one of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off. The section comprising the dedicatory letter Baldwin entitled "My Dungeon Shook," which we see from the above quote were words of some unknown bard, a former Negro slave, who spoke to the glorious spiritual phenomena of emancipation.The section comprising the "Letter from a Region of My Mind," was entitled, "Down at the Cross," again another religious allusion. This long essay has a bipartite structure.
In the first part Baldwin recounted his religious experience as a fourteen year old boy, about the age of his nephew, and his view of Christianity as an adult. He sketches out his disappointments with the Negro's religion, which he views primarily as escapist.He then turned to his second mission, which comprised the greater part of the essay, to trash the Muslim movement among African Americans. Here he attempted to come to the grips with the phenomena of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X. Elijah's brand of Islam viewed Christianity as the white man's wicked rationale for oppressing blacks and that all white people were accursed devils whose sway was destined to end. God is black and his proper address is "Allah" and he has chosen black people of America to end the devil's domination by means of the theology of Islam.
In this long letter, Baldwin also described his audience with Elijah Muhammad, who Baldwin believed was lucid, passionate, and cunning. For Baldwin the problem was that Elijah preached a dogma of racial hatred that was no better than the reverse of whites' hatred for blacks. Baldwin rejected Elijah and Malcolm.Baldwin believed he had a greater vision than Malcolm and Elijah.
He believed that the Negro's suffering was redemptive and that's the Negro's example had curative powers for the nation. Baldwin wrote as part of closing statement --I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering--enough is certainly as good as a feast--but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth--and, indeed, no church--can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakeable. At this stage of his development, Baldwin believed the Negro's redeeming love of whites, in their innocence and ignorance, would make the difference.
American blacks' complex fate, Baldwin reiterated his well-tuned song, was the rescue, the delivery of white Americans from their imprisonment in myths of racial superiority and educate them into a new, integrated sensitivity and maturity.Should such an effort fail, he warned, then the words of a slave song may come true: "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, / No more water, the fire next time!" Many whites believed that this was Baldwin's last really good piece of nonfiction.
"The songs were about escaping from yet acquiescing to the demands of a male-dominated society . . ." Bewitched: "Samantha stood at the intersection between middle-class definitions of the ideal young wife and rebelliousness against those definitions." How the media portrayed the feminist movement--angry, non-bra wearing, man-hating women.
Kate Millet versus Gloria Steinmen--ugly versus pretty. 1972-- Helen Reddy "I Am Woman." movement anthem. "'Equal pay for equal work" was a slogan quickly accepted by many journalists as a reasonable and moderate goal.' "The RIse of the Bionic Bimbo" Media's representation of women during the 80s--Backlash.
Charlies Angels, Bionic Woman, Mary Tyler Moore. The ERA as Catfight--Gloria Steinman versus Phyllis Shlafly.--Media also relies on class tensions. Narcissism as Liberation--The media portrays Women's cosmetics as liberating--while producing made up issues for the sake of consumerism--advertising-- "You're worth it." Revlon.
"I'm Not a Feminist, But . . ." 90s we have a view of manufactured by the media that Feminism looks very specific so don't want to identify with being a feminist.
. you'll get in trouble if you don't." "I'll call you "Mister Rufus.' Will that do?" "A casual labor agency--we regulars called it a slave market.
" Dana: "They wanted me to be a nurse, a secretary, or a teacher like my mother." Kevin: "I was supposed to be an engineer, myself."--Gendering in the 1970s. "Why you go 'round dressed like a man?"--Gendering in the 1820s.
Rufus to Dana: "He won't whip you for following my orders. He's a fair man."-- "Fair" being subjective i.e. hegemony.
Laurence Harvey is brilliant as a brainwashed Korean war hero who has been programmed as a Soviet sleeper/mole agent to assassinate a Presidential candidate•The movie displays the emerging role and importance of television in broadcasting public affairs and shaping opinion, and the circus atmosphere that surrounds American politics.•The time period of the provocative, sophisticated film is set in the early 50s during the height of right-wing McCarthyism - a time of tense political paranoia with the overriding, reactionary fear that Communists (Russian and Chinese) were scheming to take over the US via advanced brainwashing techniques and programmed terrorist training.
3)Inside Job is divided into five parts. We are looking into each part through this Inside Job summary.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Inside Job - Summary - Part I: How We Got Here -4)The Reagan Administration of the United States began a thirty-year-period of deregulation by the legislators in the financial system.5)Deregulation allowed the financial sector more freedom and less discipline, which provided more opportunity for profit and risk. Reflecting the profit growth resulting from deregulation, investment banks went from small, private firms to public companies.
To illustrate the growth of the financial sector beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the early 2000s, consider this - from 1978-2008 the average salary in the United States in every profession other than investment banking rose by 25% and the average salary in investment banking rose by 150%.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Inside Job - Summary - Part II: The Bubble (2001-2007) -6)In early 2000, further reflecting deregulation, a new method of mortgage lending was developed in the financial system that allowed for excessive betting without immediate risk and incentives to sabotage the system for personal profit.7)The system developed is named the Securitization Food Chain.Simply stated, the Securitization Chain is a system whereby borrowers receive home loans from lenders and the lenders pass these loans across a chain of investment banks, investors, and the insurance company AIG.With each trade, one party earns a profit and the other party earns the loan.
8)The loans were mixed with other types of debt, such as car loans and credit card debt, given a rating, and investors would include these mixes in their funds depending to their rating.Since each party was removed from risk by selling the debt, lenders could extend absurd loans that were highly unlikely to be repaid, rating agencies could grade the absurd debts highly without consequence, and investors could sell the debts with confidence and bet on the debts with insurance from AIG.9)The result was the opportunity for virtually anyone in the US to receive a home loan and purchase a home, which sent home prices incredibly high (the bubble), and since the financial sector was profiting from this procedure through the Securitization Food Chain, they were becoming vastly wealthy and developing a thirst for making extremely unwise bets and trades because of the immediate profit potential.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Inside Job - Summary - Part III: The Crisis -10)The bubble bursts. As previously mentioned, the new mortgage lending system allowed the financial sector to extend, trade, and bet on extravagant loans and pass on the risk of such action to another party in exchange for a hefty commission.
The system incentivized destructive financial behavior.11)A significant percentage of the debts being traded could not be repaid, neither by the borrowers in the public sector or the lenders and traders in the financial sector.Everyone was trading immediate profits for promises to pay debts with money they simply did not have, and the crisis occurred when it came time for everyone to pay - and no one could.12)The result? An incredible, sweeping wildfire of foreclosures and bankruptcies.The people lost their illusory homes and their previously tangible jobs.
The financial sector lost their businesses.A financial base had been removed and the contagious crisis was spreading around the globe.The US government claimed that if these major financial institutions - that caused the crisis - were allowed to fail, the effect on the global financial system would be catastrophic.The US government said these firms were 'too big to fail' and paid out several hundred billions of taxpayer money to save these firms.The unemployment and inflation from these rescues is still accumulating today.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Inside Job - Summary - Part IV: Accountability -13)In a nutshell, many of the leaders in the financial sector were brought before the United States Congress to testify - to explain their behavior and account for the global financial crisis that resulted.
Most of these individuals either did not explicitly accept responsibility or did not show much concern for their actions.14)In addition to relieving themselves of responsibility for their lead roles in the global financial crisis, many of these top-level executives were anointed with massive severance packages and corporate bonuses.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Inside Job - Summary - V: Where We Are Now -15)In a word, the pattern of financial dominion that began in the 1970s is continuing today, is characterized by a widening wealth gap between the top one percent and everyone else, as well as a deepening degree of global financial instability - systemic, corporate, and personal.The top financial heads are rising from the top of the pyramid into the lofty airs above the pyramid, while the majority is sinking into the ground. What's more, the financial and government players that combined to lead the global financial crisis - are still in power.16) This condensed version of the Inside Job summary is now concluded.Please enjoy the following interview with Charles Ferguson and Charlie Rose.
