Alright, Sunday night, of course I planned on cranking out a few more blog posts before the weekend . . . I never could have guessed that I would put that off.
I want to give a lil shout out to Iris-I feel a kind of bad pushin your blog post back so it's not the final thing people remember from this class blog, it seemed like it was pretty heartfelt.
On top of that it would be pretty embarassing if this post didn't count towards my total word count. Actually, maybe it wouldn't really be that embarassing, it would just kind of suck. Oh well, I'm going to comment on Brave New World and 1984.
Brave New World was just hilarious and about as much commentary as there needs to be on Utopia in my opinion. Thinking that we can "design" a perfect world is just outrageous. The whole of Aldous Huxley's book was just completely making fun of their bokanovskified world. It just reminds me so much of the US these days, I can't really speak for the rest of the world. We think we are making so much progress and then I read this grade A stuff from Huxley and I definitely cracked up out loud quite a few times. He was pretty much spot on. The reservation seemed like the way people around here think of tribes or something. We just go visit to get a little taste of what their world is like, but after a week we just can't stand it any longer, so we hop back on a plane and fly back.
I didn't really like the Soma aspect of Brave New World, just because I can't really think of how exactly it relates to our world today. I guess you could argue that it is kind of like people just thinking it is their birthright to take anti-depressants for all of their terrible stress, anxiety, and depression caused by our daily lives. Then again, I guess even Frederick is pretty stressful. I just hate being around giant groups of people, definitely stresses me out. Or maybe Soma relates more to people drinking alcohol to try and "ease the pain." Going out to bars on weekends does seem like it is the highlight of a good amount of people's lives, so I guess this could be a modern day representation of Soma.
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of modern day Soma is weed. You know, everyone just "chillin' out" with their "magic herb". The thing is, as "cool" as it is for a chill ass teacher to be a big pothead, I really just don't think an overwhelming amount of people smoke weed. Most people probably realize that it stopped being the hip thing to do after about the age of 14. I do wish weed would get legalized though, just so people wouldn't think it's cool anymore and maybe even less people would smoke.
Making my way back to the actual book, the ending ruled. When John just went out to live on his own in solitude I was like, "hell yeah, that's exactly how I've been wanting to live lately." Just growing your own food and not really having to worry about much else. But of course that didn't last long, everyone just couldn't leave the man on his own so he just had to get out of there the only way he knew how, by killing himself.
1984 was too corny for me, man. George Orwell just took his fake, unbelievable world way too seriously. The things that made me cringe the most were "The Book" and Winston's whole ordeal with O'Brien at the end of the book when O'Brien was trying to convince him that the though police control all memories or that the things he "knows" are wrong. In The Book it just seemed like Orwell was trying to make some profound insight into human nature and the way different countries interact, it all just seemed pretty lame to me. To be fair though, maybe he was making more of a worthy point that I didn't really catch; I will admit, I wasn't paying all that much attention during that part.
So then we had O'brien's whole controlling history speal...alright this book was miserable I'm just going to stop writing about it.
For my closing thoughts I'd like to offer an overall outline to my utopia:
-No guns, bombs, or any stuff like that. This stuff is all just terrible, we're pretty much screwed because it has already been invented and there's not much we can do now besides restrict them with laws enforced by people with more guns.
-No cars. Of course.
-As few laws as possible.
-Tons of awesome dirt running trails that last for hundreds of miles.
I thought this blog was a pretty sweet idea. Even though I didn't take advantage of it as much as I should, writing out your thoughts is a lot easier than trying to concisely express what you want to say in class.
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