Stay Tuned for Tragedy!

    When we were first tasked with creating a blog in class, I was not quite sure what I would write for my first post: something more topical, or something that I was more passionate about (the two were mutually exclusive with the kinds of ideas I had at the time). In the wake of Hurricane Irene, I tossed around the idea of writing a post about America's obsession with tragedy, an issue that became apparent when outlets like the Weather Channel released their ratings from their coverage of the big storm. As it turns out, Americans have a strange fascination with watching disasters happen and seeing just how disastrous they can be (spoiler: they can be pretty disastrous). What, for many people, was a life-threatening tempest was, for millions of viewers, an epic, real-life drama. I ultimately decided to scrap the Irene post, though, and never found a good time or reason to go back to it.
    That is, until I started reading White Noise. The book explores, to a great extent, the relationship Americans have with mass media, including commentary on our obsession with death. Clearly, we love to witness destruction, whether it is in the form of a Weather Channel reporter being knocked to his feet by a gust of wind or an unmistakably horrific car crash on the side of the road that you just can't help but gawk at when you drive past. We've all been there, why can't we look away?
    Well, according to professor Emily Godbey, we've been gawking since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In an article on AlterNet called "Appetite for Destruction: Why Are Americans So Obsessed with Disaster?" Godbey claims that after the spread of industrialism gave birth to a working class all with very similar, mundane lives (the "flattening of experience" that O'Connor discussed in class earlier this week), "the unexpected, no matter what it is, brings a certain kind of excitement to people's lives." Yet this explanation does not fully explain why people, Americans especially, choose tragedy, disaster and destruction to satisfy this need for excitment. To this, Godbey argues that "it's a safe way to get a thrill. We're able to confront a common underlying fear - the fear of dying - without having to live through it ourselves." In the same way that DeLillo's Jack Gladney faces death by immersing himself in the study of the world's greatest villain and murderer, Adolf Hitler, many Americans tune into the Weather Channel each year to study the next great killer hurricane.
    This love of death and danger is apparent in the television shows we love to watch as well, many of which were analyzed as part of our TV Tokenism project. Shows like 24, a wildly popular drama focused on a man who kills people who try to kill lots of people, is built upon the premise that the entire world is in imminent danger and bathed in an atmosphere of looming death. Even in fiction TV entertainment, people have shown that they prefer a sense of danger over comfort. The new film Act of Valor (starring active duty Navy SEALs!), too, depicts a world on the brink of total nuclear apocalypse to provide its thrills. If nothing else, it's definitely an interesting cultural phenomenon that devastation and destruction become topics which, when depicted with enough dramatic flair, bring us so much joy.
    What do you think? Is it a dangerous habit to derive joy and entertainment from tragedy? How do these cultural preferences affect us as a society and as a country?
    For now, I'll leave you with this. It is a six-minute video entitled "Nascar Crashes Compilation." Pay close attention to the music as well as the visuals, though I really hope you do not find it so entertaining as to watch all six minutes. While watching, try to keep in mind that there is a person inside each one of those cars.

No Hope for the Unseen

Yesterday in class, we touched upon the idea that socioeconomic status has a much greater effect on quality of education than it should in our country. Mr. O'Connor recited a statement he'd heard from a lower-class student who, despite his excellence in academics, showed no motivation or urgency in pursuing a higher education because, as he said, "my people aren't college people." It is obvious that, as Americans, none of us should be born exempt from an education, yet this student felt that the type of life he was born into did not accommodate aspirations of higher education, regardless of how well he had done for himself academically.
The first thing that came to my mind after hearing this was the story of Brown graduate Cedric Jennings, a man whose story was chronicled in Ron Suskind's A Hope in the Unseen. In the book, Suskind follows Jennings for several years during his academic carreer, detailing his exceedingly uphill battle to reach the Ivy League and his even more uphill battle to excel once there. Suskind goes to great lengths here to expose the extreme difficulty Jennings had excelling at his High School in inner-city Washington D.C, where he was one of very few students who had a GPA over 3.0 despite the fact that passing grades were given to students for merely showing up to classes. Jennings studied for hours before school, during his lunch, and after school in order to reach a grade merely comparable to that of students in much more economically exclusive High Schools, yet he was denied admission to MIT, the school he had been working for hundreds of extra hours to get into, and barely got into Brown University instead. Once at Brown, he found that his studies in High school in D.C did very little to prepare him for his college courses and that he could not relate to either the white students or the black students whom he learns with.
Hot on the heels of our civil liberties unit, what is clear from this book and from our discussion in class is that equal opportunity is by no means afforded to people of lower socioeconomic status in this country. The American lower-class is, for the most part, given significantly fewer opportunities than the middle and upper-classes, and, as such, has a far smaller possibility of success. While this is a topic that I could not possibly do justice to here and now, I believe it is important to compare Cedric Jennings' odyssey to the Ivy League and that of the ambitious students here at New Trier.

Ballou Senior High School, where Cedric Jennings graduated in 1995

At New Trier, academic excellence is the norm and the expectation of many parents, as well as the expectation of many students for themselves. As of last year, less than one percent of all New Trier students took all 2-level courses, which are the national average standard of college preparatory class. This means that more than ninety-nine percent of the student body here at New Trier took at least one 3-level class, which are considered accelerated courses by national standards. Comparatively - and while these statistics don't directly correlate since many schools do not employ subject levels like New Trier does - in Jennings' high school, a mere six percent of students received a grade average of a B or above. New Trier students are also expected to participate in some of the many extracurricular activities the school offers, with over seventy-seven percent of all students participating in at least one extracurricular, not counting intramurals. Meanwhile, the dropout rate at Jennings' school was over ten percent and few students participated in athletics due to the school's 2.0 GPA requirement for participation. Clearly, the standards here at New Trier are far greater than they were at Cedric Jennings' school during his enrollment, and it is no mere coincidence that New Trier township is also far wealthier than the suburb of Washington D.C. in which Jennings lived.
Hopefully, during your day at school you will think about how fortunate we are to have the opportunities that our school offers us and why those opportunities exist for us. Also, if you have any thoughts on this admittedly dense topic, please feel free to share in the comment section below.