Rhetorical Analysis of Hurricane Essay Example for Free

Rhetorical Analysis of Hurricane Essay Martin Luther King once said, â€Å"There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, popular, or political, but because it is right. † The song â€Å"Hurricane†, written by Bob Dylan takes a stand and ignores what was safe, popular, and politically right during the 1960’s and 1970’s, in order to paint a picture of injustice. Dylan organizes the actual events of a man named Rubin â€Å"Hurricane† Carter who was a middleweight boxer wrongfully accused and convicted of a double homicide. Dylan narrates the song and uses his credibility as a rock star to reason with a broader audience, while evoking the emotions of listeners by describing horrific events, prejudice, and coercion by fraudulent figures of authority that developed false allegations. As a result the man (Hurricane) authorities came to blame was convicted and put in prison for 20 years but as Dylan says in his song, Hurricane could have been the champion of the world, referring to â€Å"Hurricane,† who was a well known sports figure for his boxing talent. The song is also narrated in such a way that Dylan tries to convey a message that will not only cause a critical analysis of the injustice by his fan base but also by the general public. The setting of the song takes place in Patterson, New Jersey, which is a line written in the song that reads, â€Å"and they arrive on the scene with their red lights flashing in the hot New Jersey night. † In the first verse of the song Dylan attempts to hook listeners with the words, â€Å"pistol shots ring out in the barroom night. and after describing a bartender laying in a pool of blood he then moves on to quote a secondary character named Patty Valentine as saying, â€Å"My god they’ve killed them all! † describing the three men that lay slain in the barroom. The next two sentences tells audience what Dylan is going to do in which he says, â€Å"Here comes the story of the Hurricane, the man authorities came to blame for somethin’ he never done. Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been the champion of the world. The first verse grabs the emotions of listeners by creating fear while imagining the sound of gun shots, a woman screaming, and a man laying dead in a pool of blood. While the second to last sentence of the first verse, gives an identity to the main character â€Å"Hurricane,† which is an attempt to stimulate an audience to imagine a man who is like a hurricane. The first time listening to the song, one might envision a man who was very tall, muscular, and who could rip doors of their hinges, and could pick up Volkswagens and throw them the length of a football field. In reality â€Å"Hurricane† is only five foot, eight inches and weighs one hundred and seventy pounds. However, Dylan does a fantastic job pulling his listeners in while introducing the main character and opening events that would build on one another until an apex of the song is reached. Dylan not only exhibits credibility because of his fame but most importantly his song writing ability. Two of his previous songs â€Å"Blowin’ in the wind† and â€Å"The Times Are a Changin’† were anthems used during the U. S. Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the 1960’s. Dylan’s way with words was again what enabled him to tell of Hurricane’s awful injustice, while hoping the lyrics to the song would invoke his audience to work to prevent and end similar injustices from happening in the future. Throughout the song Dylan makes suggestions of racial prejudice and coercion by the Patterson, New Jersey police, the District Attorney (D. A. ), and the judge who over saw the proceedings. For example he writes, â€Å"Number one contender for the middle weight crown had no idea the shit was about to go down when a cop pulled him over to the side of the road just like the time before and the time before that. In Patterson that just the way things go. If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street. Less you wanna draw the heat. † The heat Dylan is referring to was the ongoing harassment of African American’s by the Patterson police. Later in verse nine Dylan writes, â€Å"All of Rubins cards were marked in advance the trial was a pig-circus, he never had a chance. The judge made Rubins witnesses drunkards from the slums. To the white folks who watched he was a revolutionary bum and to the black folks he was just a crazy nigger. No one doubted that he pulled the trigger. And though they could not produce the gun, the D. A. said he was the one who did the deed and the all-white jury agreed. † In this verse Dylan is making a point that not only were the Patterson police trying to make an example out of Hurricane but also the D. A. and the overseeing judge. Keep in mind that during 1966 the United States was in the midst of a historical transition as just two years earlier President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act outlawing all forms of discrimination against African Americans and women, including racial segregation. The act created serious tension among whites and blacks as a majority of whites refused to accept the change and the blacks were free to fight back against those who refused. In the end the tension provoked many hostile riots and fights to breakout all over the U. S. The year 1966 also marked the start of the Black Power movement, which was maintained until the 1970’s. The movement brought together black collective interest that consisted of racial pride, political goals, establishment of other social institutions, and most importantly a continued defense against racial oppression. Given the historical context one could attest that Dylan’s speculation of lingering racism could very much be true and at that time was very much alive. Throughout the song Dylan continually uses words and fraises that evoke the beliefs and values of those not only of the 60’s and 70’s but also of today’s generation. Dylan incessantly draws attention to the callous environment that was created and controlled by the Patterson police. The Police and the District Attorney needed someone to arrest for the barroom murders and the person that fit the description was Hurricane. In verse four Dylan introduces two more characters named Alfred Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley. By doing this Dylan keeps the attention of his audience as he writes, â€Å"Alfred Bello had a partner and he had a rap for the cops. Him and Arthur Dexter Bradley were just prowlin’ around he said. † Dylan is telling the story as though Bello was speaking to the police in regards to why he and his partner were at the crime scene. Dylan goes on to quote Bello again having said, â€Å"I saw two men runnin’ out and they looked like middle weights (boxers) they jumped into a white car with out-of-state-plates. Dylan uses the above sentence to further suggest that the real criminals, Bello and Bradley pinned the blame on Hurricane and his friend and hinted to the cops in such a way that directed them to accuse and arrest a well known public figure that happened to be a middle weight boxer. Dylan is again trying to send a message to his audience that Hurricane was falsely accused. After the police arrested Hurricane and took him to the hospital to be identified by a wounded victim looking â€Å"through his one dyin’ eye,† the man says, â€Å"Whad you bring him in here for? He aint the guy! Dylan continues to link events together working toward his final message as he narrates the coercion of Bello and Bradley by the Patterson police. When four months later the two are reminded of the murder and reminded of the getaway car and are asked, â€Å"You think you’d like to play ball with the law? Think it might-a been that fighter that you saw runnin’ that night? Don’t forget your white. † Dylan moves on as he writes, â€Å"Rubin Carter was falsely tried. The crime was murder one, guess who testified? Bello and Bradley and they both baldly lied and the newspapers, they all went along for the ride. How can the life of such a man be in the palm of some fools hand? To see him obviously framed couldnt help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game. † Verse ten lets you know up front that Hurricanes conviction was wrong. The next sentence continues to work on the audience’s emotions as Dylan words describe his anger and disgust and that it’s no surprise that Bello and Bradley testified. In the following line, Dylan is alluding to the Patterson county judge as the fool with Hurricane’s life in the palm of his hand. In the last sentence, Dylan’s’ words are directly aimed at the American justice system calling it a game, which tells the audience you should be ashamed too. In the final verse Dylan hits listeners with a combination of three punches as he ends with his experienced opinion, beliefs, and desires. He writes, â€Å"Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise, while Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell an innocent man in a living hell. Thats the story of the Hurricane, but it wont be over till they clear his name and give him back the time hes done. Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been the champion of the world. † It is obvious that Bello and Bradley are the criminals free to drink martini’s and know how to play the justice system game. Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell is to influence the audience’s emotions visualizing a man sitting in his own personal hell like a statue that can do nothing but wait. Dylan lets the audience know he has finished the narrative by saying, â€Å"That’s the story of Hurricane. † The statement, â€Å"But it wont be over till they clear his name and give him back the time hes done. Put him in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been the champion of the world. † is telling the audience that they need to stand up and demand that the injustice of a innocent man be cleared and compensated for the time he has spent in prison. The ending chorus reminds the audience that the wrongful conviction not only took twenty years from a man’s life but also his chance at greatness. Before the song starts, Dylan’s reputation precedes him as a bond and a trust had already been established with his audience and those of the general public who knew of him. Although the song is not a part of our current pop culture, Dylan attempts to use his credibility to draw attention back to the racial discrimination and prejudice that was still looming the country after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been implemented. From the beginning of the song to the end, Dylan tries to send a message to evoke the values and beliefs of his fans and the general public calling out to them to stand together against what was safe, popular, and politically right and to not only advocate for Rubin â€Å"Hurricane† Carter but also demand the justice system prevent further unlawful injustice from happening in the future. By narrating, Dylan uses he words and phrases to invoke the emotions and hearts of his audience by describing the pain, loss, and anger, that Hurricane felt and the disgust that Dylan, himself felt in relation to the active events in the story and those who are a part of the justice system. The last idea that Dylan leaves his audience with is Hurricane was, â€Å"put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been the champion of the world. † if it wasn’t for his wrongful incarceration.

Essay --

Reflection 2 Yassir Shahriar 4490353 Professional development is a subject about understanding and using those effectively from my prospective. Besides it enhances a vital skill called â€Å"critically thinking†. Since the course started my expectations were always at the higher level. After the long run with my team and my teacher, I personally believe that I have successfully met my expectations from this course. As I was working with my teams it was really important for me to adopt some strategies and use them accurately. I have actually done that. Hill, C (2007) said, â€Å"A group is an association of two or more individuals who have a shared sense of identity and who interact with each other in structured ways on the basis of a common set of expectations about each other’s behavior†(Hill, C, 2007, International Business, McGraw Hill/Irwin, New York, p-94). Thus my first strategy was we will discuss each of us points and everyone will take them accordingly. I thought that we have make things easier that’s why I arranged a lot of meetings. Moreover I was always connected via internet to...

Everyday Use

A Contrast between Dee and Maggie’s View Concerning Their Heritage In my writing essay I shall analyze the way in which heritage can be conceived in Alice Walker’s novel Everyday Use, trying to point out the author’s main ideas concerning the theme of the story. I would also try to describe the two daughter’s points of view, Dee and Maggie’s, about their ancestral heritage. The contrast between these two daughters is more than obvious not only in their appearance but also in their behavior when it comes to quilts from their grandmother. Everyday Use is a story narrated by a rural black woman, who is the mother of the two girls Maggie and Dee Johnson. Mrs. Johnson, is a simple woman but who, in spite of all difficulties that she passed through, she tried to give her daughters if possible, a good education and of course the most important thing, to make them aware of what heritage is indeed, the fact that traditional culture and heritage is not represented only by the possession of old objects, but also by one’s behavior and customs. She outlines in the story that she is not a very educated woman, but this does not mean that the lack of education is also reflected in her capacity to understand, to love and to respect her ancestors. Since the beginning of the story, the narrator makes obvious the contrast between Maggie and her elder sister Dee. Dee is a very ambitious girl, with a well-defined character, the one who had always been successful and ambitious. Maggie thinks â€Å"her sister has held life, always in the palm of one hand, that â€Å"no† is a word the world never learned to say to her. (Walker 2469). Dee denies her real heritage by changing her given name, after her aunt Dee, to the superficially more impressive one Wangero Leewanik Kemanjo, arguing to her mother that â€Å"Dee is dead and I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me† ( Walker 2472), what she does in fact is to reject her family identity. She inspires in her mother â€Å"a sort of aw e and fear more suitable to the advent of a goddess than the love one might expect a mother to feel for a returning daughter† (Farell, â€Å"Flight†). On the other hand, Maggie is the type of simple girl, like her mother, with little education. She is not ambitious like her sister Dee, living somehow in her mother’s shadow. But this might be also because Maggie hadn’t her sister luck and she burned severely in the house fire when she was a child, becoming now a shy and fearful person. These features are more visible in her attitude while waiting for her sister to come home. Mama is projecting her own anger and frustration onto her younger daughter when she speculates that Maggie will be cowed by Dee’s arrival. Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe† ( Walker 2469). As Marianne Hirsch says in one of her critical essays: â€Å"the mother sees in Maggie’s angerless, fear an image of her own passive acceptance of Dee’s aggression, her ow n suppressed anger† Moreover, we can see through the lines of this story that, at the beginning, Dee was the daughter that mother preferred most because of her authority and because she wanted to succeed in life by following her instincts. But when she saw her totally changed, not only physically but also in her mentality, mother realized that Maggie was the one that understood the meaning of â€Å"heritage† and tried to give her justice. It is relevant â€Å"Mama’s awakening to one’s daughter’s superficiality and to the other’s deep-seated understanding of heritage† ( Tuten, â€Å"Alice Walker’s Everyday Use† ). However, Dee seems to despise her sister, her mother and the church that helped to educate her. Intentionally or not, she is selfish and she treats her sister with indifference. While Dee escaped from the poor life she was supposed to live, Maggie, next to her mother, represents the multitude of black women who must suffer. Scarred, graceless, not bright and uneducated, â€Å"Maggie is a living reproach to a survivor like her sister† (Cowart, â€Å"Heritage†) . The contradictions about heritage and culture between Maggie and Dee become more extensive when the quilts take part from the story. After dinner, Dee discovers some old quilts which belonged to her grandmother. She is very excited that found them, thinking that these quilts represent the testament of her ancestors. Without taking into account Maggie’s opinion, she asks her mother if she can have those quilts, arguing that she is the only one who can appreciate and have the right to keep them. At first, mother hesitates to give her an answer and offers her other quilts but Dee gets upset and then mother explains to her that the quilts were from Maggie as a wedding gift. Maggie’s tolerance in the story contrasts with Dee’s boldness. When Dee insists that her sister would ruin grandma’s quilts by using them everyday, and that hanging the quilts would be the only way to preserve them, Maggie â€Å" like somebody used to never wining anything, or having anything reserved for her† says â€Å" She can have them, Mama. I can remember Grandma Dee without the quilts† (Walker, 2474). Mrs. Johnson then realizes what makes Maggie different form her sister. She sees her scarred hands hidden in her skirt and says: â€Å"When I looked at her like that something hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet. Just like when I’m in the church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy and shout† (Walker, 2475). This powerful feelings determines Mama to do something she had never done before: â€Å"she snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s lap† ( Walker, 2475). Mama’s behavior here is almost like Dee’s because she rebuffs her wishes for the first time and give justice to the most patient Maggie. The fact that she takes the quilts from Dee and gives them to Maggie, â€Å"she confirms her younger daughter’s self-worth: metaphorically, she gives Maggie her voice† ( Tuten, â€Å"Alice Walker’s Everyday Use† ). In conclusion, I can say that Everyday Use is a story about understanding heritage. This concept is very well exposed by the two characters Alice Walker created, Dee and Maggie. These two daughters have a completely different view in what concerns the heritage from their ancestors; in this case their origins and their inheritance, the quilts from Grandma Dee. Maggie is the one who understands that heritage is about respecting family’s traditions and customs while Dee destroys the traditional image kept by Mrs. Johnson and her sister. She denies her true origins by changing the given name into more fashionable one, Wangero Leewanik Kemanjo. One should appreciate his legacy because it represents indeed what we are. We can not hide our roots and even if we want, this would not be possible because it always remains present in our souls and our minds, we like it or not. WORKES CITED PRIMARY SOURCE: Walker, Alice. Everyday Use. In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. SECONDARY SOURCE: Cowart, David . †Heritage and deracination in Walker's â€Å"Everyday Use. † Studies in Short Fiction. FindArticles. com. Farrell Susan. â€Å"Fight vs. Flight: a re-evaluation of Dee in Alice Walker’s â€Å"Everyday Use†- Critical Essay†. Studies in Short Fiction. FindArticles. com. Hirsch, Marianne. â€Å"Clytemnestra’s Children: Writing the Mother’s Anger. † Alice Walker: Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Tuten, Nancy. â€Å"Alice Walker’s Everyday Use. † The Explicator 51. 2,1993 Everyday Use Everyday Use Symbolism The Quilts These quilts represent Mama's family and her heritage, they were made by Grandma Dee and Big Dee. Symbolically, each piece of material was made from scraps of clothing that once belonged to someone in their family, including pieces of their great-grandfather's Civil War uniform. . To Maggie, they represent her family; she still remembers with love her grandmother who made one of them and she says it is okay if Dee takes them because she does not need the quilts to remember Grandma Dee. To Dee, however, the quilts have no emotional value.She regards them as a type of folk art that will look impressive hanging upon her walls. (Dee embraces her African heritage while rejecting her personal family history. ) Mama gives those quilts to Maggie because she knows Maggie, unlike Dee, will honor the culture and heritage by using it, or continuing it the way it was originally intended. ‘Maggie can's appreciate these quilts! she said. ‘She'd probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use. ‘ The Butter Churn and the Dasher The author also uses the butter churn and the dasher as a symbol to show mama’s understands of heritage.When Mama takes the dasher handle in her hands, she is symbolically touching the hands of all those who used it before her. Her appreciation for the dasher and the quits is based on the love fort the people who made use of them. Dee wants to use the churn top as a centerpiece for the alcove table and do something creative with the dasher. Mama views and honors her heritage as practical by appreciating what she acquired from previous generations and putting the passed down items into everyday use. Dee views and honors her heritage as superficial by appreciating the passed down items for their materialistic and artistic value Everyday Use A Contrast between Dee and Maggie’s View Concerning Their Heritage In my writing essay I shall analyze the way in which heritage can be conceived in Alice Walker’s novel Everyday Use, trying to point out the author’s main ideas concerning the theme of the story. I would also try to describe the two daughter’s points of view, Dee and Maggie’s, about their ancestral heritage. The contrast between these two daughters is more than obvious not only in their appearance but also in their behavior when it comes to quilts from their grandmother. Everyday Use is a story narrated by a rural black woman, who is the mother of the two girls Maggie and Dee Johnson. Mrs. Johnson, is a simple woman but who, in spite of all difficulties that she passed through, she tried to give her daughters if possible, a good education and of course the most important thing, to make them aware of what heritage is indeed, the fact that traditional culture and heritage is not represented only by the possession of old objects, but also by one’s behavior and customs. She outlines in the story that she is not a very educated woman, but this does not mean that the lack of education is also reflected in her capacity to understand, to love and to respect her ancestors. Since the beginning of the story, the narrator makes obvious the contrast between Maggie and her elder sister Dee. Dee is a very ambitious girl, with a well-defined character, the one who had always been successful and ambitious. Maggie thinks â€Å"her sister has held life, always in the palm of one hand, that â€Å"no† is a word the world never learned to say to her. (Walker 2469). Dee denies her real heritage by changing her given name, after her aunt Dee, to the superficially more impressive one Wangero Leewanik Kemanjo, arguing to her mother that â€Å"Dee is dead and I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me† ( Walker 2472), what she does in fact is to reject her family identity. She inspires in her mother â€Å"a sort of aw e and fear more suitable to the advent of a goddess than the love one might expect a mother to feel for a returning daughter† (Farell, â€Å"Flight†). On the other hand, Maggie is the type of simple girl, like her mother, with little education. She is not ambitious like her sister Dee, living somehow in her mother’s shadow. But this might be also because Maggie hadn’t her sister luck and she burned severely in the house fire when she was a child, becoming now a shy and fearful person. These features are more visible in her attitude while waiting for her sister to come home. Mama is projecting her own anger and frustration onto her younger daughter when she speculates that Maggie will be cowed by Dee’s arrival. Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe† ( Walker 2469). As Marianne Hirsch says in one of her critical essays: â€Å"the mother sees in Maggie’s angerless, fear an image of her own passive acceptance of Dee’s aggression, her ow n suppressed anger† Moreover, we can see through the lines of this story that, at the beginning, Dee was the daughter that mother preferred most because of her authority and because she wanted to succeed in life by following her instincts. But when she saw her totally changed, not only physically but also in her mentality, mother realized that Maggie was the one that understood the meaning of â€Å"heritage† and tried to give her justice. It is relevant â€Å"Mama’s awakening to one’s daughter’s superficiality and to the other’s deep-seated understanding of heritage† ( Tuten, â€Å"Alice Walker’s Everyday Use† ). However, Dee seems to despise her sister, her mother and the church that helped to educate her. Intentionally or not, she is selfish and she treats her sister with indifference. While Dee escaped from the poor life she was supposed to live, Maggie, next to her mother, represents the multitude of black women who must suffer. Scarred, graceless, not bright and uneducated, â€Å"Maggie is a living reproach to a survivor like her sister† (Cowart, â€Å"Heritage†) . The contradictions about heritage and culture between Maggie and Dee become more extensive when the quilts take part from the story. After dinner, Dee discovers some old quilts which belonged to her grandmother. She is very excited that found them, thinking that these quilts represent the testament of her ancestors. Without taking into account Maggie’s opinion, she asks her mother if she can have those quilts, arguing that she is the only one who can appreciate and have the right to keep them. At first, mother hesitates to give her an answer and offers her other quilts but Dee gets upset and then mother explains to her that the quilts were from Maggie as a wedding gift. Maggie’s tolerance in the story contrasts with Dee’s boldness. When Dee insists that her sister would ruin grandma’s quilts by using them everyday, and that hanging the quilts would be the only way to preserve them, Maggie â€Å" like somebody used to never wining anything, or having anything reserved for her† says â€Å" She can have them, Mama. I can remember Grandma Dee without the quilts† (Walker, 2474). Mrs. Johnson then realizes what makes Maggie different form her sister. She sees her scarred hands hidden in her skirt and says: â€Å"When I looked at her like that something hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet. Just like when I’m in the church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy and shout† (Walker, 2475). This powerful feelings determines Mama to do something she had never done before: â€Å"she snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s lap† ( Walker, 2475). Mama’s behavior here is almost like Dee’s because she rebuffs her wishes for the first time and give justice to the most patient Maggie. The fact that she takes the quilts from Dee and gives them to Maggie, â€Å"she confirms her younger daughter’s self-worth: metaphorically, she gives Maggie her voice† ( Tuten, â€Å"Alice Walker’s Everyday Use† ). In conclusion, I can say that Everyday Use is a story about understanding heritage. This concept is very well exposed by the two characters Alice Walker created, Dee and Maggie. These two daughters have a completely different view in what concerns the heritage from their ancestors; in this case their origins and their inheritance, the quilts from Grandma Dee. Maggie is the one who understands that heritage is about respecting family’s traditions and customs while Dee destroys the traditional image kept by Mrs. Johnson and her sister. She denies her true origins by changing the given name into more fashionable one, Wangero Leewanik Kemanjo. One should appreciate his legacy because it represents indeed what we are. We can not hide our roots and even if we want, this would not be possible because it always remains present in our souls and our minds, we like it or not. WORKES CITED PRIMARY SOURCE: Walker, Alice. Everyday Use. In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. SECONDARY SOURCE: Cowart, David . †Heritage and deracination in Walker's â€Å"Everyday Use. † Studies in Short Fiction. FindArticles. com. Farrell Susan. â€Å"Fight vs. Flight: a re-evaluation of Dee in Alice Walker’s â€Å"Everyday Use†- Critical Essay†. Studies in Short Fiction. FindArticles. com. Hirsch, Marianne. â€Å"Clytemnestra’s Children: Writing the Mother’s Anger. † Alice Walker: Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Tuten, Nancy. â€Å"Alice Walker’s Everyday Use. † The Explicator 51. 2,1993 Everyday Use A Contrast between Dee and Maggie’s View Concerning Their Heritage In my writing essay I shall analyze the way in which heritage can be conceived in Alice Walker’s novel Everyday Use, trying to point out the author’s main ideas concerning the theme of the story. I would also try to describe the two daughter’s points of view, Dee and Maggie’s, about their ancestral heritage. The contrast between these two daughters is more than obvious not only in their appearance but also in their behavior when it comes to quilts from their grandmother. Everyday Use is a story narrated by a rural black woman, who is the mother of the two girls Maggie and Dee Johnson. Mrs. Johnson, is a simple woman but who, in spite of all difficulties that she passed through, she tried to give her daughters if possible, a good education and of course the most important thing, to make them aware of what heritage is indeed, the fact that traditional culture and heritage is not represented only by the possession of old objects, but also by one’s behavior and customs. She outlines in the story that she is not a very educated woman, but this does not mean that the lack of education is also reflected in her capacity to understand, to love and to respect her ancestors. Since the beginning of the story, the narrator makes obvious the contrast between Maggie and her elder sister Dee. Dee is a very ambitious girl, with a well-defined character, the one who had always been successful and ambitious. Maggie thinks â€Å"her sister has held life, always in the palm of one hand, that â€Å"no† is a word the world never learned to say to her. (Walker 2469). Dee denies her real heritage by changing her given name, after her aunt Dee, to the superficially more impressive one Wangero Leewanik Kemanjo, arguing to her mother that â€Å"Dee is dead and I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me† ( Walker 2472), what she does in fact is to reject her family identity. She inspires in her mother â€Å"a sort of aw e and fear more suitable to the advent of a goddess than the love one might expect a mother to feel for a returning daughter† (Farell, â€Å"Flight†). On the other hand, Maggie is the type of simple girl, like her mother, with little education. She is not ambitious like her sister Dee, living somehow in her mother’s shadow. But this might be also because Maggie hadn’t her sister luck and she burned severely in the house fire when she was a child, becoming now a shy and fearful person. These features are more visible in her attitude while waiting for her sister to come home. Mama is projecting her own anger and frustration onto her younger daughter when she speculates that Maggie will be cowed by Dee’s arrival. Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe† ( Walker 2469). As Marianne Hirsch says in one of her critical essays: â€Å"the mother sees in Maggie’s angerless, fear an image of her own passive acceptance of Dee’s aggression, her ow n suppressed anger† Moreover, we can see through the lines of this story that, at the beginning, Dee was the daughter that mother preferred most because of her authority and because she wanted to succeed in life by following her instincts. But when she saw her totally changed, not only physically but also in her mentality, mother realized that Maggie was the one that understood the meaning of â€Å"heritage† and tried to give her justice. It is relevant â€Å"Mama’s awakening to one’s daughter’s superficiality and to the other’s deep-seated understanding of heritage† ( Tuten, â€Å"Alice Walker’s Everyday Use† ). However, Dee seems to despise her sister, her mother and the church that helped to educate her. Intentionally or not, she is selfish and she treats her sister with indifference. While Dee escaped from the poor life she was supposed to live, Maggie, next to her mother, represents the multitude of black women who must suffer. Scarred, graceless, not bright and uneducated, â€Å"Maggie is a living reproach to a survivor like her sister† (Cowart, â€Å"Heritage†) . The contradictions about heritage and culture between Maggie and Dee become more extensive when the quilts take part from the story. After dinner, Dee discovers some old quilts which belonged to her grandmother. She is very excited that found them, thinking that these quilts represent the testament of her ancestors. Without taking into account Maggie’s opinion, she asks her mother if she can have those quilts, arguing that she is the only one who can appreciate and have the right to keep them. At first, mother hesitates to give her an answer and offers her other quilts but Dee gets upset and then mother explains to her that the quilts were from Maggie as a wedding gift. Maggie’s tolerance in the story contrasts with Dee’s boldness. When Dee insists that her sister would ruin grandma’s quilts by using them everyday, and that hanging the quilts would be the only way to preserve them, Maggie â€Å" like somebody used to never wining anything, or having anything reserved for her† says â€Å" She can have them, Mama. I can remember Grandma Dee without the quilts† (Walker, 2474). Mrs. Johnson then realizes what makes Maggie different form her sister. She sees her scarred hands hidden in her skirt and says: â€Å"When I looked at her like that something hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet. Just like when I’m in the church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy and shout† (Walker, 2475). This powerful feelings determines Mama to do something she had never done before: â€Å"she snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s lap† ( Walker, 2475). Mama’s behavior here is almost like Dee’s because she rebuffs her wishes for the first time and give justice to the most patient Maggie. The fact that she takes the quilts from Dee and gives them to Maggie, â€Å"she confirms her younger daughter’s self-worth: metaphorically, she gives Maggie her voice† ( Tuten, â€Å"Alice Walker’s Everyday Use† ). In conclusion, I can say that Everyday Use is a story about understanding heritage. This concept is very well exposed by the two characters Alice Walker created, Dee and Maggie. These two daughters have a completely different view in what concerns the heritage from their ancestors; in this case their origins and their inheritance, the quilts from Grandma Dee. Maggie is the one who understands that heritage is about respecting family’s traditions and customs while Dee destroys the traditional image kept by Mrs. Johnson and her sister. She denies her true origins by changing the given name into more fashionable one, Wangero Leewanik Kemanjo. One should appreciate his legacy because it represents indeed what we are. We can not hide our roots and even if we want, this would not be possible because it always remains present in our souls and our minds, we like it or not. WORKES CITED PRIMARY SOURCE: Walker, Alice. Everyday Use. In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. SECONDARY SOURCE: Cowart, David . †Heritage and deracination in Walker's â€Å"Everyday Use. † Studies in Short Fiction. FindArticles. com. Farrell Susan. â€Å"Fight vs. Flight: a re-evaluation of Dee in Alice Walker’s â€Å"Everyday Use†- Critical Essay†. Studies in Short Fiction. FindArticles. com. Hirsch, Marianne. â€Å"Clytemnestra’s Children: Writing the Mother’s Anger. † Alice Walker: Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Tuten, Nancy. â€Å"Alice Walker’s Everyday Use. † The Explicator 51. 2,1993

Organ Donation - 1237 Words

Specific Purpose: To persuade my audience to donate their organs and tissues when they die and to act upon their decision to donate. Thesis Statement: The need is constantly growing for organ donors and it is very simple to be an organ donor when you die. I. INTRODUCTION A. Attention material/Credibility Material: How do you feel when you have to wait for something you really, really want? What if it was something you couldn’t live without? Well, my cousin was five years old when he found out he needed a new kidney. He went on the organ waiting list right away. He was called twice during a six month span that they had a kidney available only to find out that the kidney wasn’t a good match. He had to wait again. The†¦show more content†¦Talk with your family about your decision. They will be involved in the donation arrangements when you die. If they do not know your wishes of becoming a donor, your wishes may never be carried out. 2. Mark your driver’s license so that your license indicates your intent to donate. Each state varies. a. Fill out, sign and carry a uniform donor card with you. b. This donor card says what organs you wish to have donated and also has places for your family members to sign as witnesses after you have discussed your decision with them (Gundersen Lutheran Hospital [LaCrosse, WI] undated brochure). [Transition: You can see that it isn’t difficult to be an organ donor. Now let’s look at what may happen if you choose to donate your organs and what may happen if you choose not to.] C. Organ donation benefits both the donor’s family and the recipients. 1. If you do donate your organs, your family and the people who receive your organs might benefit in a similar way like this family. A seventeen year old died of head injuries in a car accident. His mom decided to donate his organs. His heart went to a prison chaplain, his kidneys went to a mother of 5 children and a Vietnam vet. The Vietnam vet is energetic and finally is getting his college degree. The teenager gave life to others and his family feels a sense of satisfaction and comfort that other lives have been touched by his (University ofShow MoreRelated Organ Donation Essay740 Words   |  3 PagesOrgan Donation Organ donation is a topic which contains many conflicting views. To some of the public population organ donation is a genuine way of saving the life of another, to some it is mistrusted and to others it is not fully understood. There are some techniques that can be used to increase donation. Of these techniques the most crucial would be being educated. If the life threatening and the critical shortage of organs was fully understood by the public, organ donation wouldRead MoreOrgan Donation : Organ Donations Essay1323 Words   |  6 PagesPreviously organ donation has encountered organ donors and organ supply rejections. Organ donation challenges and demands decreased as the organ shortages increase over the years. Organ donation mission is to save many terminally ill recipients at the end stages of their lives, the significance of the organ donation is to give back to restore one’s quality of life. The ongoing issues may present an idealistic portrait of how these issues may be resolved. As a result organ donation mission is toRead MoreOrgan Donation. â€Å"Organ Donation Is Not A Tragedy, But It1112 Words   |  5 PagesOrgan Donation â€Å"Organ donation is not a tragedy, but it can be a beautiful light, in the midst of one† (Unknown). There has been many disbeliefs about donating your organs over the years. The organ demand drastically exceeds the available supply, which is why more people need to be organ donors. People should become organ donors because of the limited availability of organs and the chance to save many lives. Although many people think that if you are an organ donor doctors won’t try as hard toRead MoreOrgan Donation2096 Words   |  9 Pages stat! After applying yourself to be a recipient for a donation, you will be added to the waiting list for that organ. This can take months, if not years. Receiving an organ can be sudden whenever an organ match has been found for you. We should reevaluate organ donation due to someone’s personal religion, inability to benefit the poor, numerous hospital visits, and potential endangerment to their own well being. Therefore, in 2009, organ transplants became a demand everywhere so abruptly thatRead MoreOrgan Donation And Organ Organs Essay1308 Words   |  6 PagesOrgan donations have encountered organ donor and organ supply rejections. Organ donation challenges and demands increase as the organ shortages increase over the years. Organ donation’s mission is to save many terminally ill recipients at the end stages of their lives. 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Others even applaud them for being a lifesaver. The question that lingers on many: Is it proper to charge for the organ donations or not? According to the Mayo Clinic, in United States alone, over 100,000 individuals are in the offing for an organ donation. Regrettably, several individuals may at no time procure the bid that a fit benefactor of an organ matches his or her— one more wagerRead MoreOrgan Donation1163 Words   |  5 PagesBut by becoming an organ donor, you can be able to say â€Å"I will save a life.† Organ donation is a selfless way to give back to others, and to be able to make a huge difference by giving another person a second chance at life. Unfortunately, the number of patients waiting for organs far exceeds the number of people who have registered to become organ donors. Patients are forced to wait months, even years for a match, and far too many die before they are provided with a suitable organ. 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The Health Care Providers Didn t Understand The Lees...

The health care providers didn’t understand the Lee’s culture. The doctors never took the time to understand the Hmong culture and instead assumed that their practices may have been what was negatively affecting Lia’s recovery. According to Fadiman (2003), in the hospital they would call the shaman â€Å"witch doctoring† (p. 35). Many times the Lees wouldn’t understand the instructions of the doctors and I believe this also impacted the way that they thought of medicine. The doctors loved Lia and so did her parents, but they just had different ways of thinking. The Lees thought that sickness comes from the soul, and the doctors believed that there was a physiological cause for the sickness. The doctors were not open minded about the Lee’s†¦show more content†¦I think the main point in this story is not to give up, but instead to be patient and have the courage to fight back. According to the Hmong culture a shaman helps to cure the soul. A doctor cures physiological problems. As we learn throughout this class there is a difference between an illness and a disease. An illness or a disease may have the absence of the other. In most cases an illness can be present without a disease. In the case of Lia there was a presence of both illness and disease. If txiv neeb and the American doctor would have balanced their practices and learned from each other, this would have positively affected the way the Lees thought about modern medicine. I believe that faith plays an important role in Lia’s case, and if the doctors would have understood the way that txiv neeb thought and vice versa, the Lees would have trusted American doctors and medicine more. Learning from txiv neeb would have also helped the American doctors in Lia’s case and in other cases when treating Hmong patients by understanding their culture. It is important for the doctors to understa nd the Hmong culture and specifically the way that a txiv neeb works because in Merced a third of the population were Hmong and used a tixv neeb as their main source of healing. A txiv neeb takes the time to be with a patient while a doctor would only spend 15 minutes with them. A txiv neeb could have learn how to perform CPR in case it was ever

The Danger Of Cyber Attacks - 1705 Words

COLLECTED DATA The Danger of Cyber Attacks A cyber attack is an online malicious attack that disrupts, steals, and/or damages a system. There are numerous types of cyber attacks, and different ways to carry out one. As the world becomes more dependent on technology, the damage potential for cyber attacks increases. Government agencies around the world are even competing in cyber attacks with one another, for offensive and defensive reasons. Two popular attack methods are malware and denial-of-service attacks. Malware There are many forms of malware, such as viruses and botnets. Malware is any code or software written for the purposes of carrying out malicious actions. Malware has evolved rapidly and is becoming much more sophisticated over time. Anti-malware systems provide the best protection against malware. They typically provide real-time protection by scanning files before, during, or after the software is installed. Anti-malware systems aren t perfect, however. Code can be written in a way that it can be difficult for the system to understand and detect malware inside the code (Shahid, Horspool, Traore Sogukpinar, 2015; Zhang, Raghunathan Jha, 2014). Denial-of-Service A denial-of-service (DoS) attack occurs when an attacker maliciously sends a high load on a server or network in an attempt to disrupt it. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) occurs when the attacker uses multiple sources instead of one in order to mask its location and/or increase theShow MoreRelatedThe Danger Of Cyber Attacks On Power Plants1542 Words   |  7 PagesThe danger of cyber-attacks on power plants are something that needs to be looked at closely to avoid costly deadly incidents. Cybersecurity has become a vital component of our world today and it needs to evolve fast to keep up in its protection from the outside. Cybersecurity protects us from unauthorized shutdowns, break-ins, financial and social ruin. We live in a world that has become completely reliant on computers for everything. They are able to cause chaos and even shutdown â€Å"nuclear centrifugesRead MoreImportance Of Cloud Security In The Public Sector894 Words   |  4 Pagesweaknesses of cloud comput ing will enable a new acceptance for the usage of cloud computing in public organizations. At this present time there has been a drastic uplift in security breaches of cyber information, and those that are spreading widely and that are accumulating devastating quantities. Most of those attacks are impacting an extremely large variety of private government and entities. The cybersecurity incidents are becoming more prevalent, more impactful, and more complicated and there are noRead MoreThe Problem Of Cyber Warfare1531 Words   |  7 Pagesintentions, new security dangers have arisen along with them. Though a large chunk of these dangers are studied and well known by some, little is being done to prevent these dangers and it needs to change. Starting off, one of the most critical issues the United States and the world have with combating cyberattacks is that there is no clear definition of what one actually is. Cyber warfare is currently defined as â€Å"internet-based conflict involving politically motivated attacks on information and informationRead MorePublic Education Campaign Design And Implementation904 Words   |  4 Pagesimplementation: Introduction: All through mankind s history, there have been numerous dangers to the security of countries. These dangers have achieved vast scale misfortunes of life, the demolition of property, injuries and sickness, relocating of masses and destroying financial assets. Terrorist activities incorporate deaths, kidnappings, destruction of assets, hijackings, extensive bombings, digital attacks (PC based), biological and chemical threats. Education can play vital and important roleRead MoreUnited States Computer Emergency Readiness Team : Legal Regulations, Compliance And Investigation1267 Words   |  6 Pagesfrom physical and cyber dangers. Of the varied kinds of infrastructure, cyberspace is crucial constituting the information regarding the government and business operations, crisis management and readiness information, and our crucial digital and process control systems. Safeguarding these critical resources and infrastructure is very much needed, which helps in maintaining the integrity of economic and national security. So, to implement this protection, home land security’s cyber security group establishedRead MoreCyber Attack On The United States1674 Words   |  7 PagesCyber Security Abstract Cyber attack has been a huge problem for so many years and there have been a lot of attempts to stop it but there have not been enough resources for this to happen. This paper offers more top to bottom clarification of Cyber attack, reasons, dangers, and defenselessness. It talks about the impact on individual; gives situations of Cyber attacks lastly clarifies ways that people can keep themselves from being casualties of Cyber attack. This paper will give insights on howRead MoreCyber Criminals Are Dangers?1175 Words   |  5 PagesCyber criminals are dangers 1 Now the real question, is cybercriminals are dangers to us? Some experts will say that it depends on the data that companies contain whether it attract the cybercriminal or not. Such as, â€Å"customer contact info, credit card data, health data, or valuable intellectual property.† (Armerding). On the other hand, some experts say it depends on the size of the company. Small to midsize organizations usually are attractive targets because they are frequently have less securityRead MoreThe Government s Methods Of Intervention891 Words   |  4 Pagessecurity on Federal networks† (Fact Sheet). By detecting common cyber dangers and obtain additional resources from the private sector assets can reduce the risk of threats against our country. President Obama and his Administration has addressed the major risk of cybersecurity facing our nation today. The government has executed an extensive variety of regulations to improve upon cybersecurity, residential and globally, to en hance cyber defense mechanisms and prevention measures. On February 13th,Read MoreThe World Is Safer And Safer1248 Words   |  5 Pageshappiness and wealth. A lot of data, such as GDP and compared graphs, convinced people that the world is safe, whereas obscure the hidden hazards. Selective data may make it look like the world is safer and better, but danger in minority as well as some threats and problems, such as cyber-attacks, drug-resistant germs, food security and climate change, should also be taken into consideration. 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Day After Tomorrow Free Essays

FTER Hollywood cinema and climate change: The Day After Tomorrow. Ingram, David. In Words on Water: Literary and Cultural Representations, Devine, Maureen and Christa Grewe-Volpp (eds. We will write a custom essay sample on Day After Tomorrow or any similar topic only for you Order Now ) (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008). Climate change, like many other environmental problems, is slow to develop, not amenable to simple or fast solutions, and caused by factors that are both invisible and complex (Adam 17). Making a narrative film about climate change therefore does not fit easily into the commercial formulae of mainstream Hollywood, which favour human-interest stories in which individual protagonists undergo a moral transformation before they resolve their problems through heroic action in the final act. Can such classical narratives mediate an issue as complex as climate change without being not only inadequate, but even dangerous, lulling their audience into a false sense of security about our ability to deal with such problems? Ecocritic Richard Kerridge observes that a British journalist responded to the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 by framing it within the familiar narrative of the Second World War, with its emphasis on ‘a successful outcome and a narrative closure’. For Kerridge, such narrative strategies may be an overly reassuring way of representing environmental threats, and reveal therefore that the ‘real, material ecological crisis’ is ‘also a cultural crisis, a crisis of representation’ (Kerridge 4). Yet, as Jim Collins argues, ‘mass-mediated cultures’, including those of popular Hollywood cinema, are characterised by ‘semiotic complexities of meaning production’, which leave even popular, generic texts open to multiple interpretations (Collins 17). Film theorist Stephen Prince describes a Hollywood movie as a ‘polysemous, multivalent set of images, characters, and narrative situations’, which therefore constitute what he calls an ‘ideological agglomeration’, rather than a single, coherent ideological position (Prince 40). This polysemy may arise from the Hollywood industry’s commercial intention to maximize profits by appealing to as wide and diverse an audience as possible by making movies which, ideologically speaking, seek to have it all ways at once. One consequence is that, when we theorize about the effects popular movies may or may not have on public awareness of environmental issues, those effects are more complex, and less deterministic, than is often assumed is some academic film theories. This essay will explore the range of meanings generated by The Day After Tomorrow (2004), which frames the issue of anthropogenic climate change within the familiar genres of the disaster and science fiction movie. Ideological analysis of the film, combined with a study of its audience reception, suggests that even a classical Hollywood narrative can generate a degree of ideological ambiguity which makes it open to various interpretations, both liberal and conservative. The ideological ambiguity of The Day After Tomorrow derives in part from the way its narrative mixes the modes of realism, fantasy and melodrama. A realist film will attempt to correspond to what we understand as reality, mainly through the optical realism of its mise-en-scene and the sense of psychological plausibility produced by both its script and the performance of its actors. Melodrama, on the other hand, will simplify character and heighten action and emotion beyond the everyday. Hollywood movies tend to work by moving between these two modes of representation. Some genres, such as science fiction and horror, also move between realism and fantasy, a mode which exceeds realist plausibility by creating a totally fictive and impossible diegetic world. As a science fiction movie, then, The Day After Tomorrow deliberately blurs the distinction between realism and fantasy. The narrative begins from a scientifically plausible premise: the melting of the Artic ice-cap, caused by anthropogenic global warming, cools the North Atlantic Current, colloquially known as the ‘Gulf Stream’, and thereby affects the weather in the Northern hemisphere. The movie then extrapolates from this premise beyond even the worst-case scenarios proposed by climate scientists. The switching off of the thermohaline current generates a global superstorm, as a result of which an ice sheet covers Scotland and a tsunami floods Manhattan. The movie’s literary source, it is worth noting, was The Coming Global Superstorm (1999), by Art Bell and Whitely Streiber, whose television talk show on the paranormal suggests an interest in the ‘parascientific’; that is, in speculation beyond what is provable or falsifiable by scientific method. When interpreted literally, that is, as realism, The Day After Tomorrow clearly violates notions of scientific plausibility. The basic climatology in the movie is inaccurate: hurricanes can only form over large bodies of warm water, not the cold seas found in high latitudes, where polar lows are the main storm systems. The movie also distorts the science of climate change, mainly by accelerating the time frame within which its effects take place, and by making them much worse than predicted. Any slowdown in the thermohaline current would take a period of years, at least, and probably centuries, rather than the days featured in the film. Moreover, even if the North Atlantic Current did switch off, average temperatures would still be likely to rise, rather than fall, because of the greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere (Henson 112-5). The film’s central narrative, in which government paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) walks in sub-zero temperatures all the way from north of Philadelphia to the New York Public Library, to rescue his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhall) who is sheltering there, is thus impossible: neither would survive such low temperatures. For helicopters to freeze in mid-air, temperatures would not only be too cold for snow, but also too cold for human survival. Burning books in a library would be insufficient to keep people alive. Such implausibilities are worth pointing out, not because cinema audiences necessarily take what they see as scientific truth, but because science fiction often provides an opportunity to learn some real science. Indeed, as we will see later in this essay, environmental groups used the release of the movie as a ‘teachable moment’ on the science of climate change (Leiserowitz 6). The two-disc DVD edition of the movie includes a documentary on the science of climate change; screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff commented on its release that, although ‘our primary concern’ in making the film ‘was entertainment rather than education. On the DVD, there’s room for both’. Acknowledging that the time frame he created for the movie was accelerated for fictional purposes, and that the ‘superfreeze’ was ‘purely a cinematic device’, he added that ‘the political, agricultural and societal consequences of a sudden change in the ocean currents would still be catastrophic’ (Nachmanoff 1). To dismiss The Day After Tomorrow purely for its scientific inaccuracies, then, clearly misses the point of the movie, which is to use realist elements of climate science as a starting point for melodrama and fantasy, so that it can dwell on the spectacle of extreme weather, appropriate for a blockbuster disaster movie, and also invite the audience’s emotional engagement with the human-interest story that becomes the main focus of narrative. It is to these elements in the film that we will now turn. As a ‘natural disaster’ melodrama, the film works on an opposition between nature and civilization, and invites an ambiguous identification on the part of the viewer: in Hollywood terms, we are invited to ‘root for’ both nature and civilization at various points in the narrative, although the values of civilization eventually become the dominant ones. Before that happens, however, the scenes of extreme weather make the experience of environmental apocalypse strangely attractive. As Maurice Yacowar observes, the natural disaster movie ‘dramatizes people’s helplessness against the forces of nature’ (Yacowar 218). The set pieces of extreme weather in The Day After Tomorrow reveal the sublime power of wild nature: violent, chaotic, powerful beyond human control, and therefore exciting and seductive. Environmentalist Paul Hawken writes that the concept of doomsday ‘has always had a perverse appeal, waking us from our humdrum existence to the allure of a future harrowing drama’ (Hawken 204). As Stephen Keane points out, although disaster movies regularly feature television news reports commenting on the events that are taking place, they do not go on ‘to make the critical point that we are all electronic voyeurs’ (Keane 84). The Day After Tomorrow follows this pattern. The audience’s complicity in seeking cinematic thrills in the scenarios of mass death and destruction caused by the weather is encouraged, rather than questioned, by the movie itself. Indeed, such thrills are the raison d’etre of its genre. Yet the aesthetics of the sublime have always been based on vicariousness; if we take pleasure in the destructive forces of nature, it is from the safe distance of our movie seats, where we are in the position of voyeurs, rather than of victims. This construction of victimhood in the disaster movie depends on narrative alignment: when people die, we do not dwell on them, nor on the bereaved people they leave behind. Typical of the disaster genre, the focus of nature’s destructiveness in The Day After Tomorrow is the city. Hollywood disaster movies, writes Geoff King, share with millennial groups ‘a certain delirious investment in the destruction of the metropolis’ (King 158). When a series of tornadoes attack Los Angeles, the mise-en-scene focuses on familiar landmarks: the Hollywood sign, the Capitol Records building, and a billboard advertising the model Angelyne. Screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff observes on the DVD commentary that preview audiences greeted the moment where the Angelyne sign flattens the television reporter with cheers and applause (Emmerich). The sense of retribution is difficult to avoid: perhaps there is poetic justice in the media figure, parasitical on other people’s suffering, finding his nemesis in Angelyne, the model and aspiring actress who paid to advertise herself on her own billboards, and thus became for some emblematic of the meretricious values of the city. As Mike Davis observes, Los Angeles is often given special treatment in apocalyptic narratives. ‘No other city,’ he writes, ‘seems to excite such dark rapture’. Unlike other cities, the destruction of Los Angeles ‘is often depicted as, or at least secretly experienced as, a victory for civilization’ (Davis 277). Geoff King draws upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘carnivalesque’ to account for such moments of ‘licensed enjoyment of destruction’, based on an ‘overturning of cultural norms’ (King 162). But the destruction is too cruel, as well as unfocussed and generalised, to be simply an anti-authoritarian gesture. As Susan Sontag noted, science fiction films provide a ‘morally acceptable fantasy where one can give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings’ (Sontag 215). Freud’s notion of the ‘death wish’ thus better captures the dark side of such fantasies. For Freud, such aggressions were natural drives that need to be controlled; art provides catharsis for such anti-social instincts. Patricia Mellencamp draws on Freud to argue that American television is both ‘shock and therapy; it both produces and discharges anxiety’ (Mellencamp 246). The disaster movie works in a similar way, mobilising and exploiting our negative drives and emotions. But are there unconscious meanings specific to the natural disaster movie? One reading of such movies is as ‘revenge of nature’ narratives, which enact a fantasy of nature getting its own back for its mistreatment at the hands of human beings. Psychoanalyst Karl Figlio draws on the theories of Melanie Klein to argue that scientific thinking itself is an act of repressive violence towards Nature. ‘Nature killed,’ he writes, ‘is nature in a vengeful mood, a primitive retaliatory phantasy that fuels apocalyptic forebodings. The more scientific the culture, the more it is at the mercy of irrational fears, and the more it is dependent on scientific protection from them’ (Figlio 72). He cites Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an ‘extreme example of scientific mapping that calls forth revenge from nature’ (75). According to this reading, then, when we watch nature getting its revenge, we as viewers are able to purge our guilt about its degradation. However, as Yacowar notes, the moral attitude of the typical disaster movie is ambiguous. Poetic justice in disaster films,’ he writes, ‘derives from the assumption that there is some relationship between a person’s due and his or her doom’. However, this notion breaks down when the ‘good die with the evil’ (Yacowar 232). The Day After Tomorrow works according to these generic expectations, with Nature at times appearing amoral in its destructiveness, and at other times, a force of moral retribution and punishment. The arrogant businessmen who bribe the bus driver, and the corruptible bus driver himself, get their comeuppance when they drown in the tidal wave that engulfs Manhattan. Jeffrey Nachmanoff reveals in the DVD commentary that, in an early draft of the script, the businessman had been negotiating an insider deal with the Japanese businessman killed by the hailstorm in Tokyo (Emmerich). In the final version, the latter lies to his wife on his cell phone moments before his death. The ethical critique in these scenes fits into the ideological agenda of many disaster films. As King writes, such films ‘include an element of criticism of capitalism, but this is a gesture that for the most part leaves its core values largely intact. A few ‘excesses’ are singled out, such as the greedy cost-cutting that undermines the integrity of the eponymous star of The Towering Inferno, leaving the remainder mostly untouched’ (King 153). In The Day After Tomorrow, then, greedy, self-interested individuals are punished. Yet innocent people also die in the movie, including the climate scientists who freeze to death in Scotland, led by the avuncular Terry Rapson (Ian Holm), and Jack’s friend Frank (Jay O. Sanders), who falls to his death through the roof of a building, after cutting his own rope to prevent his friends from endangering their lives in trying to rescue him. These are figures of heroic sacrifice, also central to the disaster genre, because they bring out the redemptive aspects of the apocalypse. The film does not state clearly where the British royal family stand in this hierarchy of innocence and guilt: what is clear, is that death by climate change is no respecter of class privilege and wealth. The disaster movie, then, is about which values are the key to survival. The rescue of the innocent, French-speaking African family is thus crucial in einforcing the movie’s ethical hierarchy based on racial, national and gender differences: they are saved by the white American woman (Laura), who in turn is saved by the white American male (Sam), thereby enacting in miniature two important themes in the movie. The most important of these is the narrative of male heroism and redemption. Melodrama, writes Linda Williams, is about a ‘retrieval and staging of innocence’ (Williams 7). In this film, the melodramatic plot of father rescuing son makes the moral point that hard-working fathers need to take a more active role in bringing up their sons. The movie implies that, although millions of people may be dead, if one American family can be saved, then at least some good has come out of the eco-apocalypse. This message is more liberal, or at least not as unambiguously patriarchal, as in earlier disaster movies. In keeping with Stephen Prince’s notion of ideological agglomeration, mentioned earlier, although Jack’s wife is a doctor, she ends up playing the role of surrogate mother to a seven-year old boy with cancer, separated from his parents by the storm. The movie can thus be interpreted as either liberal (she is a doctor) or conservative (she is placed in the stereotypical female role of nurturer). The second important theme in the movie is the United States’ self-appointed role as global protector-policeman. The rescue narrative trumpets the frontier values of male physical heroism, strong leadership and individualism, encapsulated by the iconic image of the torch of the Statue of Liberty emerging from the waves of the tsunami that engulfs Manhattan. However, America’s role in world politics is also questioned by a more liberal discourse in the movie, when American refugees are forced to flee illegally into Mexico, in an ironic reversal of the real politics on the national border. This ironic reversal is itself made ambiguous, though, when later the United States government writes off all Third World debt, but in return, wins the right for its citizens to live as ‘guests’ in those countries. It should be noted that not all Hollywood movies with environmental themes are as individualistic in their proposed solutions as The Day After Tomorrow. Some have endorsed more collective forms of action, even in narratives led by strong individuals: an image of placard-waving protestors recurs in Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home (1995) and Fly Away Home (1996) as a sign of collective resistance. Ultimately, The Day After Tomorrow prefers American notions of liberal individualism, which it turns into universal values by identifying them with human civilization as a whole. Indeed, civilization, rather than wild nature, becomes the real object of audience identification by the end. The choice of the New York Public Library as the place of sanctuary and rescue is significant in this respect. One of the survivors makes sure he preserves the Gutenberg Bible from burning, not because he believes in God, he says, but because, as the first book ever printed, it represents ‘the dawn of the age of reason’. ‘If Western civilization is finished’, he adds, ‘I’m going to save at least one little piece of it’. Ultimately, then, the movie celebrates reason and science as the values most central to Western civilization. Unusually for a Hollywood disaster movie, scientists are neither evil nor incompetent. As Yacowar notes, specialists in disaster movies, including scientists, ‘are almost never able to control the forces loose against them’. The genre thus serves ‘the mystery that dwarfs science’ (Yacowar 228). This is also true of The Day After Tomorrow, in that the scientists are unable to contain the devastating effects of climate change once they have begun. ‘Ultimately,’ writes ecocritic Sylvia Mayer, ‘the movie makes the point that the most advanced and dedicated scientific work is still powerless against the forces of nature once they are unleashed’ (Mayer 111). Nevertheless, the scientists are the heroes of the movie. Their advice on the risks of climate change was ignored by the politicians until it was too late. As the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration angrily tells the Vice-President: ‘You didn’t want to heat about the science when it would have made a difference’. The scientists’ computer models prove correct: in the movie, unlike in real life, climate science provides the clear, certain and unambiguous knowledge necessary for survival. Moreover, advanced technology is ultimately a force for good. Jack is able to locate his son in the Public Library under the frozen wastes of Manhattan because of his friend’s portable satellite navigation system (which, of course, would not work in such a massive storm). He is also seen driving a hybrid Toyota Prius earlier in the film. Reason, science and technology thus win the day. However, as Sylvia Mayer also notes, the movie stops short of simplistically advocating a technological fix for environmental problems as complex as climate change (Mayer 117). The values of civilization finally triumph over the destructive forces of wild nature when the pack of wolves, which escaped from Central Park Zoo earlier in the movie, return to attack Sam and his friends when they are searching for medicine and food. That the wolves are computer-generated special effects only adds an extra layer of irony to the triumph of civilization and benign technology in the movie. Indeed, the movie itself can be seen as a paean to the imaginative power of Computer Generated Imaging. In Eco Media (2005), Sean Cubitt argues that The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2002-3) can be read as a celebration of the computer technologies from which it was made, which are an artisanal mode of production that demonstrates a creative place for technology within ‘green’ thinking. There is an ‘increasing belief’, he suggests, ‘that through the development of highly technologised creative industries, it is possible to devise a mode of economic development that does not compromise the land’ (Cubitt 10). The thematic resolution of The Day After Tomorrow is ambiguous, however. The ending of the movie follows the recurrent pattern of the genre identified by Geoff King, in which ‘the possibility of apocalyptic destruction is confronted and depicted with a potentially horrifying special effects/spectacular ‘reality’, only to be withdrawn or limited in its extent’ (King 145). Typically, then, destruction is extensive, but total apocalypse is prevented at the last moment. The superstorm passes, thereby confirming Jack’s earlier opinion that the storms will last ‘until the imbalance that created them is corrected’ by ‘a global realignment’. Gazing at a beautiful, calm Earth, an astronaut in the International Space Station comments that he has ‘never seen the air so clear’. In Winston Wheeler Dixon’s phrase, this could be the ‘exit point for the viewer’ that disaster movies invariably provide (Dixon 133); the moment where the audience is let off the hook with a simplistic, evasive solution to the seemingly intractable problem explored in the rest of the movie. To return to the question posed at the start of this essay, does such an ending merely encourage evasion, denial and complacency in regard to issues such as anthropogenic climate change? Dixon argues that contemporary American cinema serves those who ‘wish to toy with the themes of destruction’, from movies about atomic apocalypse to those that flirt with Nazism. This cinematic ‘cult of death’, he concludes, is ‘the ultimate recreation’ for an exhausted, media-saturated culture, a cult which ‘remains remote, carefully contained within a box of homicidal and genocidal dreams’ (Dixon 139). But the ideological ambiguity of The Day After Tomorrow, as well as its audience reception, suggests that the process of interpretation is more open and varied than this. From an environmentalist perspective, the melodramatic ending of the film is ambiguous. No matter what human beings do, it appears, the Earth will heal itself. According to this reading, the message of the movie is that, because the storm eventually passes, we don’t need to worry. This message resembles the right-wing appropriation of the Gaia hypothesis; that is, the idea, proposed by the British chemist James Lovelock, that the Earth as a whole is a self-regulating system in a natural state of homeostatic balance. In his 1999 book Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, Peter Huber used the concept of Gaia to justify a conservative manifesto that called for the dismantling of existing environmental regulations. The ‘most efficient way to control’ pollutants such as greenhouses gases, he argued, ‘is not to worry about them at all. Let them be. Leave them to Gaia’ (Huber 128). The notion of Gaia, we should note, is not the sole property of New Age environmentalists or deep ecologists. According to this interpretation, the movie appears to endorse the idea that humanity, through a combination of ingenuity, courage and chance, can survive whatever Nature may throw at us, an argument used by conservatives like Huber to justify a non-interventionist approach to environmental issues. It is a mistake, however, to assume that the final moments of a movie, when narrative closure is achieved, dictate its overall meaning. An analogy may be drawn here with the critical analysis of the role of women in film noir. As Janey Place argues of the female characters in films such as Double Indemnity (1946), ‘it is not their inevitable demise we remember but rather their strong, dangerous, and above all, exciting sexuality’ (Place 48). In a similar way, the most memorable images in The Day After Tomorrow are probably the scenes of extreme weather. The main advertising image for the movie showed the shot of the hand of the Statue of Liberty held above the storm surge: an image of survival which at least includes a sense of struggle, rather than the calm, reposeful Earth revealed at the close of the film. Indeed, the above interpretation of the film as conservative is contradicted by its more explicit message, which advocated liberal political reform in the election year of 2004. Early in the film, Vice-President Becker, played by an actor who bears an obvious resemblance to Dick Cheney, refuses to listen to the advice of scientists on global warming, arguing that to take action would harm the American economy. In another reference to George W. Bush’s presidency, we are told that the administration in the movie has also refused to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. At the end of the movie, Becker, now President, appears on television to apologise to the nation out of a newfound sense of humility: ‘For years we operated under the belief that we could continue consuming our planet’s natural resources without consequence. We were wrong. I was wrong’. Perhaps the most unbelievable part of the whole movie, the President’s public apology confirms the words of the African-American homeless man earlier in the film, who refers to people with their ‘cars and their exhausts, and they’re just polluting the atmosphere’. The disaster has been a wake-up call for America, and the new start will allow for the changes in lifestyle necessary for a more sustainable future. The government will also change its attitude to the Third World from one of arrogance to gratitude. In these moments, the movie works as a secular form of jeremiad; ‘secular’ because the environmental catastrophe is not seen as punishment from God, but as human-created. Opie and Elliott argue that both ‘implementational and evocative strategies’ are necessary in successful jeremiads, and cite Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) as a powerful exemplar (Opie and Elliott 35). The Day After Tomorrow also uses both pathos and rational argument to convince its audience of the need to take steps to avoid environmental catastrophe. Critical speculation on the effectiveness or otherwise of making a disaster movie about global warming can draw on the conclusions of an empirical study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research of the reception of the movie in Germany. This found that the movie did not appear to reinforce feelings of fatalism in its audience. Less than 10% of the sample agreed with the statement, ‘There’s nothing we can do anyway’, whereas 82% preferred, ‘We have to stop climate change’. Reusswig). Indeed, the Potsdam study makes hopeful reading for environmentalists. It found that the publicity surrounding the film triggered a new interest in climate change, and raised some issues previously unfamiliar to audiences, such as the role of oceans in global warming. A similar study of reception in the United States concluded that the film ‘led moviegoers to have higher levels of concern and worry about global warming, to estimate various impacts on the United States as more likely, and to shift their conceptual understanding of the climate system toward a threshold model. Further, the movie encouraged watchers to engage in personal, political, and social action to address climate change and to elevate global warming as a national priority’. However, whether such changes constituted merely a ‘momentary blip’ in public perceptions remained to be seen (Leiserowitz 7). These empirical studies are important because they show that audience reception is a more complex and variable process than it is sometimes taken for in film theory. According to some versions of psychoanalytic ‘subject positioning’ theory, Hollywood movies like The Day After Tomorrow tend to render spectators passive. Under the influence of Bertolt Brecht’s theories of narrative, film academics such Colin McCabe and Steven Heath argued that only modernist or avant-garde narrative techniques can produce a more active (even revolutionary) film spectator. As the 1992 textbook New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics puts it, psychoanalytic film theory ‘sees the viewer not as a person, a flesh-and-blood individual, but as an artificial construct, produced and activated by the cinematic apparatus’ (Stam 147). In his book The Crisis of Political Modernism (1999), D. N. Rodowick exposes the flaws in such thinking. The politics of political modernism, he writes, assume ‘an intrinsic and intractable relation between texts and their spectators, regardless of the historical or social context of that relation’ (Rodowick 34). But film viewers are flesh-and-blood individuals, and when they are treated as such by film theorists and researchers, the phenomenon of film reception becomes more complex and nuanced, and less deterministic and stereotyped, than that imagined by subject positioning theory. Empirical audience research shows that we do not all watch the same movie in the same way, and that audience responses are complexly determined by a long list of variables, such as nation, region, locality, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race and, last but certainly not least, individual temperament. When we look at the public reception of The Day After Tomorrow, then, it is clear that different interest groups appropriated the movie in different ways. Both sides of the public debate about climate change interpreted the movie within a realist framework, either positively or negatively, and produced selective readings in order to further their own agendas. Patrick Michaels, one of the minority of scientists who stills rejects the idea of human-created climate change, pointed out the scientific flaws in the movie, and damned Hollywood for irresponsibly playing into the hands of liberal environmentalists by exaggerating the threat of global warming (Michaels 1). Liberal-left environmental campaigners also understood that the movie’s foundation in science was flawed. However, they found its scientific exaggerations and inaccuracies less important than what they saw as its realistic portrayal of the American government’s denial of the scientific evidence for global warming. As former Vice-President Al Gore put it, ‘there are two sets of fiction to deal with. One is the movie, the other is the Bush administration’s presentation of global warming’ (Mooney 1). Gore joined with the liberal Internet advocacy organization MoveOn. rg, which used the movie’s release as an opportunity to organize a national advocacy campaign on climate change. Senators McCain and Lieberman also used the movie to promote the reintroduction of their Climate Stewardship Act in Congress (Nisbet 1). Greenpeace endorsed the ‘underlying premise’ of the film, that ‘extreme weather events are already on the rise, and g lobal warming can be expected to make them more frequent and more severe’. It summed up its response to the movie with the line: ‘Fear is justified’ (Greenpeace 1-2). The use of this movie to encourage environmental debate suggests that it is perhaps only if Hollywood movies like The Day After Tomorrow are people’s sole, or even main, source of information on the environment that we should worry. As Sylvia Mayer argues, Hollywood environmentalist movies ‘have the potential to contribute to the development of an ‘environmentally informed sense of self’ that is characterised by an awareness of environmental threats, by the wish to gain more effective knowledge about them and by a disposition to participate actively in efforts to remedy the problem’ (Mayer 107). In this respect, a classical, Hollywood-style narrative does not necessarily inculcate or reinforce a feeling a complacency or denial it its audience. In any case, no narrative can be as complex as the reality to which it refers; all art is a process of simplifying, selecting and giving shape to reality. Classical narrative forms and genre movies such as The Day After Tomorrow can focus thought and provide an imaginative and provocative response to environmental crisis. WORKS CITED Adam, Barbara (1998), Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards, Routledge, London and New York. 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