Poison Gold Leaf Research Paper
Poison Gold Leaf: How Cameras Corrode Our Nation
“To know that you do not know is the best.
To think you know when you do not is a disease.
Recognizing this disease as a disease is to be free of it.”
― Laozi Long Island City, Queens. At around 5 pm. on Thursday, September 6, 2012, a 28 year-old father named Oscar Arzeno can be seen furiously kicking an ATM machine, too drunk to correctly withdraw his money. Soon he is arguing with the gas clerk, 27 year-old Jesse Singh, a former amateur kickboxer from Mumbai. At first they appear to be having a heated discussion. The first sign of physical violence occurs when Oscar attempts to slap away Jesse’s hand, while Jesse is making a nonviolent hand gesture. After more verbal arguing, the drunk Oscar instigates by taking the first swing. From here, all hell breaks loose: …show more content…
Jesse responds with belligerent vigor, first giving Oscar a powerful punch and then a hard kick, the two of which send Oscar crashing down to the floor. Despite his state, Oscar instinctively knows to flee Oscar’s formidable fighting prowess, but Oscar, antagonized, proceeds to chase a now scared and endangered Oscar around the station. Oscar attempts to slow Jesse by flinging a gas hose towards him, but this does not deter Oscar, who simply catches the hose and casts it aside. A resolute Oscar can then be seen running across the street after Jesse, where he eventually catches up to him and throws him to the ground and then proceeds to beat Oscar to a pulp. Later,when the authorities find Oscar on the street, he is unresponsive. He is sent to a hospital, where later he dies (Vera Chinese). The whole incident is caught on CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television). This footage is later posted online on YouTube by the New York Post, a popular New York newspaper, under the video title: “Hot temper leads to Queens death - New York Post.” Today, this video has approximately 4 million views. And one need only scroll through the comments underneath it to quickly understand the general public’s attitude towards this tragedy. Most comments, because Oscar was the “bad guy,” point fun at his downfall—poke fun at his death:
You can 't judge a book by its cover. That spic got beat to death by the sand man.
Here lays Oscar Arzeno who bravely died in the pursuit of trouble making. —kizzmac
You were an inspiration to maggots everywhere.
His life so shortly extinguished ,won 't be sadly missed by millions
Rest in pieces
— trufantom21
Both of these comments epitomize the users’ general attitude towards Oscar who, because of his drunken escapade in the gasoline station, looked for trouble, and hence “deserved” the trouble that found him, and ultimately ended him. This hateful attitude towards Oscar might also be based off of Oscar’s previous criminal activities: Arzeno was once subdued upon attempting to flee from cops who were trying to arrest him after he was caught selling coke to an undercover officer on school grounds. Arzeno would go on to plead guilty to misdemeanor drug possession and receive three years’ probation (Vera Chinese). All of these are reasons for why YouTube users shun Oscar so much, and venerate Jesse as a justified “sand man.” However, some commentors do in fact acknowledge Jesse’s rash behavior: I think the attendant should be charg3 with murder , yeah the victim striked him first but the klerk took it to far he knew he got the victim back for that silly weak punch he took at him,the clerk is a peace of shit too he took advantage of this skill an killed a man for pleasure.
— teekambino
Hyman Roth I agree with you , even the animals understand that phylosophy . you cant chase someone if He gave up.
— bejakabyle
It is quite clear that the degree to which different users feel towards Jesse’s behavior is variant: “teekambino” is clearly much more incensed over Jesse’s behavior than is bejakbyle. They both seem to agree, however, that Jesse’s general behavior was uncivil, that due to his evidently superior fighthing prowess, he should have stopped fighting when Oscar had decided to flee the gas station, instead of aggressively chasing after him and proceeding to hurt him when he had clearly given up. Though they agree his self-defense was justified, they disdain him for quickly becoming too belligerent, thus causing a tragic end that could have been avoided. But regardless of whose side these commentors are on, one thing is clear: this real life tragedy, through its posting on YouTube, has become a spectacle. As if a boxing match, commentors are in heated debate over what is fairplay and what isn’t, who played dirty and who didn’t. Any bored person can easily go online at any time, find this video, quickly comment on it as some of the above people have (some were more informed than others), and then continue on about their merry day. It does not have to be online either: CCTV footage is constantly being exhibited to the general public through the news, as well as through TV shows like “Most Shocking,” and “Cops.” Online posting of CCTV footage is distinct because one is here exposed to the general public’s different attitudes towards the incidents depicted. But regardless of the medium, it is clear that this accessibility of CCTV footage sheds some light on the general public’s attitude towards violence, which in these contexts becomes a form of entertainment. CCTVs were originally used by Germany and the US to overlook the launching of V2 rockets and testing of atomic weapons during the 1940s.
Today, they have become a prevalent security measure in many non-military American facilities (“History of CCTV”). CCTVs can now be found in most gasoline stations and convenience stores, aiming to prevent lawbreaking behavior and assure lawabiding dilligence. Its effects are comparable to those of the Panopticon, a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. In the Panopticon, inmates are stationed in a circular perimeter, and a manager or staff of the institution is able to watch them from an “inspection tower,” placed in the middle of the prison. In his 1975 book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, French social theorist Michel Foucault points out how Bentham’s design was meant “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (201). Similar to the Panopticon’s central inspection tower, CCTVs act as an ever functioning lense of authority—an authority that is exercised “spontaneously and without noise”
(206). CCTVs, through the leaking of footage displaying events of violence (violent crimes or accidents depicting the injuring of a person/people) into the web, help plant the notion that violence is a form of entertainment. This in turn once more reflects the American’s media-bent mindset: that moments caught behind a lens depicting violence or sexuality are nothing short of awe-inspiring “spectacles.” “Hot temper/Queens death” is only one example from a vast collection of these kinds of videos found online. YouTube is swimming with all kinds of “shocking moments” caught by CCTVs. Such videos depict an endless array of public displays of violence, including robberies, fights, car accidents, fights, murders, moments in sports gone wrong—the list goes on and on. For all these videos, not just “Hot temper/Queens death,” one will find as they scroll through the user comments that most of these are comical or rude (or both), often pointing fun at the victims and/or mocking the situations that they find themselves in—even when these situations include matters of life and death. Cultural forces are then moving the effects of a panoptic mechanism in unexpected ways. CCTVs no longer function simply to govern discipline in its subjects, but to laugh at them as well. They no longer only justly punish subjects when they break the law, but unjustly punish subjects, through public humiliation, when they accidentally make a mistake, or when an unanticipated misfortune befalls them. And unlike the traditional function of a panoptic mechanism, this one serves no benefitting, societal purpose—it simply insults, demeans, hurts. Sadly, these kinds of deriding responses can still be found in YouTube videos depicting even the most grave situations, like the infamous atrocity committed by Al Qaeda terrorists on 9/11 in the World Trade Center. Users mock the footage of the collision on the twin towers:
i agree the lizard people are behind it
— George Guettler
To hell with Islam
— Danny Leo
“George Guettler”’s is a kind of “witty” comment that glamorizes the situation into some sort of comedic show, while “Danny Leo”’s is ignorant in that he is attacking an entire nation, rather than the extremist group responsible for the atrocity. Susan Sontag carefully examines this type of ignorance in her 2004 New York Times article “Regarding The Torture of Others.” In it, Sontag criticized the images taken by American soldiers of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, a prison in Baghdad used for detention purposes by the U.S.-led coalition occupying Iraq. More importantly, Sontag critiques the way these images were depicted. Clearly, these images were to the soldiers portraits of a spectacle: one of these depicts a woman soldier holding a naked male prisoner on a leash. Another shows men forced to masturbate before the camera. Such images reflect the way sex has become an integral part of American entertainment—these images some would deem “pornographic.” One of the things that is most striking about these images is that these soldiers made the conscious effort to set up these poses, some of them quite intricate: perhaps the best known photograph regarding the tortures of Abu Ghraib involves a hooded and wired Iraqi who was told he would be eletrocuted if he fell off a box. In this case, American soldiers betray the traditional American concept of a leading house on a hill, all because “America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun” (Sontag). The issue that CCTV footage like “Hot temper/Queens death” sheds light on, then, is this well known fact: the glamorization of violence and sex in the media. Whether it’s a raunchy, lesbian show (The L Word) or a movie about a group of girls in bikinis joining the Florida gangland (Springbreakers), today’s media’s glamorizing depiction of violence and sex tells us that these two are concepts both normal and comical. This media stems the same cultural attitude that Sontag discusses, and is prevalent in cases where the violence (“Hot temper/Queens death”) or sex (the photos Sontag critiques) behind a lense is in fact real. But even when it is, there are still many people (like the crude commentors on YouTube) who still live the incidents vicariously, as if they were spectacles. Violence does not have to be a contributing factor of a “lense” for this kind of response to take place. For example, in 1955, the Museum of Modern Art first hosted the exhibition The Great Family of Man, curated and assembled by photographer Edward Steichen. The exhibit featured 503 photographs from 68 countries, capturing a cosmopolitan account of the human condition. It aimed to document the universality of our humanity by touching on worldwide themes like birth and death. In response to this work, French semiotician Roland Barthes points out in his Mythologies how Steichen’s work unveils a still standing trait of American culture: its vicariousness. Barthes argues that Steichen’s “sentimentalized” vision served only as “an alibi to a large part of our humanism” (100). Comparing Steichen’s exhibition to an alibi, Barthes is telling us that its aim to sentimentalize humanity is unnecessary. To him, the myriad thematic portraits of birth and death do nothing more than provide a poetic lyricism for the observer that “tells us, literally, nothing” (101). Hence, the exhibition is incomplete: it does not inform, it does not tell us anything essential about the photographs taken, because they are not meant to inform, but to act as a substitute for emotion. Great Family’s design, then, forces the observer to view human life vicariously. It is not the violence (or the sex) themselves, per se, in the media that is the problem, but the way in which it is depicted—forcing us to receive it vicariously.The media beautifies violence and sex and casts it over our country, cementing it into our culture, gilding a form of superficial poison gold leaf over our nation that begins to corrode the very substance that shapes it, the founding ideals that are meant to hold it together, the values of a “virtuous” nation. Too many people, like “kizzmac” and “trufantom21,” continue to succumb to this gilding. And they are not alone: whenever we respond to unamusing realities, atrocities, in ill-mannered ways, we are succumbing to this gilding. As we continue to laugh demeaningly, mockingly, at Facebook pictures, car accidents, planes crashes, torture, and war, we are damaging “America’s claim to moral superiority” (1) and we are succumbing. We are constantly subjected to this gilding. What would have to ensue, then, to cease this corrosion, is a new kind of “bending” by the media, to alter the way American citizens view the concepts of violence and sex. Barthes asserts:
“Whether or not the child is born with ease or difficulty, whether or not his birth causes suffering to his mother, whether or not he is threatened by his high mortality rate, whether or not such and such a type of future is present to him: this is what your Exhibitions should be telling people, instead of an eternal lyricism of birth” (102).
Barthes here is referring to Steichen’s photographs, which are meant to spark touching emotion on the observers through their depictions of suffering, poverty, and death. However, he points out that such an aim is not only fruitless, it should be doing something else entirely—it should be informing about these throes in far-off countries, making the observer more cognizant of these issues. Similarly, a “new media” would seek, not to appeal to the same “thrills” (those stemmed by the glamorization of violence and sex), but to spark introspection: to get people to think about the kinds of injustices that are present in foreign lands. Such a society is not one, as with Steichen’s Great Family, embellished with quotations from the Old Testament, like “‘this look over the human condition must somewhat resemble the benevolent gaze of God on our absurd and sublime ant-hill’” (100). It is, instead, one where incidents like those depicted in “Hot temper/Queens death” are not treated like an entertaining show, where commentors like “kizzmac” and “trufantom21” do not exist, because they have been replaced by a new kind of attitude, of civility, has been integrated into the culture. It is, instead, essentially the metamorphosis of the modern media, the moralization of the whole nation—the shattering of the poison gold leaf.
Word Count: 2506
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Seuil, 1957.
Foucalt, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Random House Inc., 1995.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding The Torture of Others. 23 May 2004. 27 February 2014.
Vera Chinese, Rocco Parascandola, Corky Siemaszko. QueensgGas station attendant beats drunk man to death for vandalizing cash machine. 6 September 2012. 18 March 2014.
Cover Letter:
Abstract: In this essay, I present the problem, through a specific example (the video “Hot temper leads to Queens death - New York Post”) that an uncivil attitude towards violence can be found online on YouTube videos depicting incidents caught on CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television) video footage. I claim that this attitude stems from the (well-known) media’s glamorization of violence and sex that is in fact undermining American ideals. Textual evidence is used to describe CCTV, the relationship between the observed and the observers of the observed (like the YouTube commentors). My motive is to get people who are exposed to these kinds of videos and real-life depictions of real-world atrocities/accidents to be more cognizant about the attiude in which they receive these events.
Reflection: My previous draft had a lot of feedback where I was told I had to pick out a specific exhibit. Although I have done this, I cannot help but to feel that it was not as smoothly integrated into the rest of the essay the way I would have wanted it to be. In other words, how this video (“Hot temper leads to Queens death - New York Post”) fits into my larger issue of a “poison gold leaf” might not have been as clear as I would have wanted it to be. Another issue was the use of textual sources we were given. In my first essay, it was clear that I did not know how to use some of these—this is a matter of reading comprehension. Secondly, because the way I tried to get them to “speak” to each other failed the first time, I did not really do this in the second; this is something I have to keep practicing. Instead, what we have are what feel like parenthetical comments on what so-and-so author would have said about something I assert in my essay.
Articulating Future Goals: Better textual analysis, not only sothat I know how to use the sources, but also to learn how to get them to speak to each other. I do not feel that my transition between ideas, from the smaller scale to the larger, was all that clear. I think next time I am going to keep the “action/inaction” sentence strategy; maybe forcing myself to look at my sentences on a smaller scale will help me see the relationship between them. Even though I had an exhibit, it was not all that clear what I was trying to do with it. I suppose, for the next essay, that it should be most clear to myself, from draft one, what my exhibit can do for my stakes (which, in this essay, I also feel is not obvious).
“To know that you do not know is the best.
To think you know when you do not is a disease.
Recognizing this disease as a disease is to be free of it.”
― Laozi Long Island City, Queens. At around 5 pm. on Thursday, September 6, 2012, a 28 year-old father named Oscar Arzeno can be seen furiously kicking an ATM machine, too drunk to correctly withdraw his money. Soon he is arguing with the gas clerk, 27 year-old Jesse Singh, a former amateur kickboxer from Mumbai. At first they appear to be having a heated discussion. The first sign of physical violence occurs when Oscar attempts to slap away Jesse’s hand, while Jesse is making a nonviolent hand gesture. After more verbal arguing, the drunk Oscar instigates by taking the first swing. From here, all hell breaks loose: …show more content…
Jesse responds with belligerent vigor, first giving Oscar a powerful punch and then a hard kick, the two of which send Oscar crashing down to the floor. Despite his state, Oscar instinctively knows to flee Oscar’s formidable fighting prowess, but Oscar, antagonized, proceeds to chase a now scared and endangered Oscar around the station. Oscar attempts to slow Jesse by flinging a gas hose towards him, but this does not deter Oscar, who simply catches the hose and casts it aside. A resolute Oscar can then be seen running across the street after Jesse, where he eventually catches up to him and throws him to the ground and then proceeds to beat Oscar to a pulp. Later,when the authorities find Oscar on the street, he is unresponsive. He is sent to a hospital, where later he dies (Vera Chinese). The whole incident is caught on CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television). This footage is later posted online on YouTube by the New York Post, a popular New York newspaper, under the video title: “Hot temper leads to Queens death - New York Post.” Today, this video has approximately 4 million views. And one need only scroll through the comments underneath it to quickly understand the general public’s attitude towards this tragedy. Most comments, because Oscar was the “bad guy,” point fun at his downfall—poke fun at his death:
You can 't judge a book by its cover. That spic got beat to death by the sand man.
Here lays Oscar Arzeno who bravely died in the pursuit of trouble making. —kizzmac
You were an inspiration to maggots everywhere.
His life so shortly extinguished ,won 't be sadly missed by millions
Rest in pieces
— trufantom21
Both of these comments epitomize the users’ general attitude towards Oscar who, because of his drunken escapade in the gasoline station, looked for trouble, and hence “deserved” the trouble that found him, and ultimately ended him. This hateful attitude towards Oscar might also be based off of Oscar’s previous criminal activities: Arzeno was once subdued upon attempting to flee from cops who were trying to arrest him after he was caught selling coke to an undercover officer on school grounds. Arzeno would go on to plead guilty to misdemeanor drug possession and receive three years’ probation (Vera Chinese). All of these are reasons for why YouTube users shun Oscar so much, and venerate Jesse as a justified “sand man.” However, some commentors do in fact acknowledge Jesse’s rash behavior: I think the attendant should be charg3 with murder , yeah the victim striked him first but the klerk took it to far he knew he got the victim back for that silly weak punch he took at him,the clerk is a peace of shit too he took advantage of this skill an killed a man for pleasure.
— teekambino
Hyman Roth I agree with you , even the animals understand that phylosophy . you cant chase someone if He gave up.
— bejakabyle
It is quite clear that the degree to which different users feel towards Jesse’s behavior is variant: “teekambino” is clearly much more incensed over Jesse’s behavior than is bejakbyle. They both seem to agree, however, that Jesse’s general behavior was uncivil, that due to his evidently superior fighthing prowess, he should have stopped fighting when Oscar had decided to flee the gas station, instead of aggressively chasing after him and proceeding to hurt him when he had clearly given up. Though they agree his self-defense was justified, they disdain him for quickly becoming too belligerent, thus causing a tragic end that could have been avoided. But regardless of whose side these commentors are on, one thing is clear: this real life tragedy, through its posting on YouTube, has become a spectacle. As if a boxing match, commentors are in heated debate over what is fairplay and what isn’t, who played dirty and who didn’t. Any bored person can easily go online at any time, find this video, quickly comment on it as some of the above people have (some were more informed than others), and then continue on about their merry day. It does not have to be online either: CCTV footage is constantly being exhibited to the general public through the news, as well as through TV shows like “Most Shocking,” and “Cops.” Online posting of CCTV footage is distinct because one is here exposed to the general public’s different attitudes towards the incidents depicted. But regardless of the medium, it is clear that this accessibility of CCTV footage sheds some light on the general public’s attitude towards violence, which in these contexts becomes a form of entertainment. CCTVs were originally used by Germany and the US to overlook the launching of V2 rockets and testing of atomic weapons during the 1940s.
Today, they have become a prevalent security measure in many non-military American facilities (“History of CCTV”). CCTVs can now be found in most gasoline stations and convenience stores, aiming to prevent lawbreaking behavior and assure lawabiding dilligence. Its effects are comparable to those of the Panopticon, a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. In the Panopticon, inmates are stationed in a circular perimeter, and a manager or staff of the institution is able to watch them from an “inspection tower,” placed in the middle of the prison. In his 1975 book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, French social theorist Michel Foucault points out how Bentham’s design was meant “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (201). Similar to the Panopticon’s central inspection tower, CCTVs act as an ever functioning lense of authority—an authority that is exercised “spontaneously and without noise”
(206). CCTVs, through the leaking of footage displaying events of violence (violent crimes or accidents depicting the injuring of a person/people) into the web, help plant the notion that violence is a form of entertainment. This in turn once more reflects the American’s media-bent mindset: that moments caught behind a lens depicting violence or sexuality are nothing short of awe-inspiring “spectacles.” “Hot temper/Queens death” is only one example from a vast collection of these kinds of videos found online. YouTube is swimming with all kinds of “shocking moments” caught by CCTVs. Such videos depict an endless array of public displays of violence, including robberies, fights, car accidents, fights, murders, moments in sports gone wrong—the list goes on and on. For all these videos, not just “Hot temper/Queens death,” one will find as they scroll through the user comments that most of these are comical or rude (or both), often pointing fun at the victims and/or mocking the situations that they find themselves in—even when these situations include matters of life and death. Cultural forces are then moving the effects of a panoptic mechanism in unexpected ways. CCTVs no longer function simply to govern discipline in its subjects, but to laugh at them as well. They no longer only justly punish subjects when they break the law, but unjustly punish subjects, through public humiliation, when they accidentally make a mistake, or when an unanticipated misfortune befalls them. And unlike the traditional function of a panoptic mechanism, this one serves no benefitting, societal purpose—it simply insults, demeans, hurts. Sadly, these kinds of deriding responses can still be found in YouTube videos depicting even the most grave situations, like the infamous atrocity committed by Al Qaeda terrorists on 9/11 in the World Trade Center. Users mock the footage of the collision on the twin towers:
i agree the lizard people are behind it
— George Guettler
To hell with Islam
— Danny Leo
“George Guettler”’s is a kind of “witty” comment that glamorizes the situation into some sort of comedic show, while “Danny Leo”’s is ignorant in that he is attacking an entire nation, rather than the extremist group responsible for the atrocity. Susan Sontag carefully examines this type of ignorance in her 2004 New York Times article “Regarding The Torture of Others.” In it, Sontag criticized the images taken by American soldiers of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, a prison in Baghdad used for detention purposes by the U.S.-led coalition occupying Iraq. More importantly, Sontag critiques the way these images were depicted. Clearly, these images were to the soldiers portraits of a spectacle: one of these depicts a woman soldier holding a naked male prisoner on a leash. Another shows men forced to masturbate before the camera. Such images reflect the way sex has become an integral part of American entertainment—these images some would deem “pornographic.” One of the things that is most striking about these images is that these soldiers made the conscious effort to set up these poses, some of them quite intricate: perhaps the best known photograph regarding the tortures of Abu Ghraib involves a hooded and wired Iraqi who was told he would be eletrocuted if he fell off a box. In this case, American soldiers betray the traditional American concept of a leading house on a hill, all because “America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun” (Sontag). The issue that CCTV footage like “Hot temper/Queens death” sheds light on, then, is this well known fact: the glamorization of violence and sex in the media. Whether it’s a raunchy, lesbian show (The L Word) or a movie about a group of girls in bikinis joining the Florida gangland (Springbreakers), today’s media’s glamorizing depiction of violence and sex tells us that these two are concepts both normal and comical. This media stems the same cultural attitude that Sontag discusses, and is prevalent in cases where the violence (“Hot temper/Queens death”) or sex (the photos Sontag critiques) behind a lense is in fact real. But even when it is, there are still many people (like the crude commentors on YouTube) who still live the incidents vicariously, as if they were spectacles. Violence does not have to be a contributing factor of a “lense” for this kind of response to take place. For example, in 1955, the Museum of Modern Art first hosted the exhibition The Great Family of Man, curated and assembled by photographer Edward Steichen. The exhibit featured 503 photographs from 68 countries, capturing a cosmopolitan account of the human condition. It aimed to document the universality of our humanity by touching on worldwide themes like birth and death. In response to this work, French semiotician Roland Barthes points out in his Mythologies how Steichen’s work unveils a still standing trait of American culture: its vicariousness. Barthes argues that Steichen’s “sentimentalized” vision served only as “an alibi to a large part of our humanism” (100). Comparing Steichen’s exhibition to an alibi, Barthes is telling us that its aim to sentimentalize humanity is unnecessary. To him, the myriad thematic portraits of birth and death do nothing more than provide a poetic lyricism for the observer that “tells us, literally, nothing” (101). Hence, the exhibition is incomplete: it does not inform, it does not tell us anything essential about the photographs taken, because they are not meant to inform, but to act as a substitute for emotion. Great Family’s design, then, forces the observer to view human life vicariously. It is not the violence (or the sex) themselves, per se, in the media that is the problem, but the way in which it is depicted—forcing us to receive it vicariously.The media beautifies violence and sex and casts it over our country, cementing it into our culture, gilding a form of superficial poison gold leaf over our nation that begins to corrode the very substance that shapes it, the founding ideals that are meant to hold it together, the values of a “virtuous” nation. Too many people, like “kizzmac” and “trufantom21,” continue to succumb to this gilding. And they are not alone: whenever we respond to unamusing realities, atrocities, in ill-mannered ways, we are succumbing to this gilding. As we continue to laugh demeaningly, mockingly, at Facebook pictures, car accidents, planes crashes, torture, and war, we are damaging “America’s claim to moral superiority” (1) and we are succumbing. We are constantly subjected to this gilding. What would have to ensue, then, to cease this corrosion, is a new kind of “bending” by the media, to alter the way American citizens view the concepts of violence and sex. Barthes asserts:
“Whether or not the child is born with ease or difficulty, whether or not his birth causes suffering to his mother, whether or not he is threatened by his high mortality rate, whether or not such and such a type of future is present to him: this is what your Exhibitions should be telling people, instead of an eternal lyricism of birth” (102).
Barthes here is referring to Steichen’s photographs, which are meant to spark touching emotion on the observers through their depictions of suffering, poverty, and death. However, he points out that such an aim is not only fruitless, it should be doing something else entirely—it should be informing about these throes in far-off countries, making the observer more cognizant of these issues. Similarly, a “new media” would seek, not to appeal to the same “thrills” (those stemmed by the glamorization of violence and sex), but to spark introspection: to get people to think about the kinds of injustices that are present in foreign lands. Such a society is not one, as with Steichen’s Great Family, embellished with quotations from the Old Testament, like “‘this look over the human condition must somewhat resemble the benevolent gaze of God on our absurd and sublime ant-hill’” (100). It is, instead, one where incidents like those depicted in “Hot temper/Queens death” are not treated like an entertaining show, where commentors like “kizzmac” and “trufantom21” do not exist, because they have been replaced by a new kind of attitude, of civility, has been integrated into the culture. It is, instead, essentially the metamorphosis of the modern media, the moralization of the whole nation—the shattering of the poison gold leaf.
Word Count: 2506
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Seuil, 1957.
Foucalt, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Random House Inc., 1995.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding The Torture of Others. 23 May 2004. 27 February 2014.
Vera Chinese, Rocco Parascandola, Corky Siemaszko. QueensgGas station attendant beats drunk man to death for vandalizing cash machine. 6 September 2012. 18 March 2014.
Cover Letter:
Abstract: In this essay, I present the problem, through a specific example (the video “Hot temper leads to Queens death - New York Post”) that an uncivil attitude towards violence can be found online on YouTube videos depicting incidents caught on CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television) video footage. I claim that this attitude stems from the (well-known) media’s glamorization of violence and sex that is in fact undermining American ideals. Textual evidence is used to describe CCTV, the relationship between the observed and the observers of the observed (like the YouTube commentors). My motive is to get people who are exposed to these kinds of videos and real-life depictions of real-world atrocities/accidents to be more cognizant about the attiude in which they receive these events.
Reflection: My previous draft had a lot of feedback where I was told I had to pick out a specific exhibit. Although I have done this, I cannot help but to feel that it was not as smoothly integrated into the rest of the essay the way I would have wanted it to be. In other words, how this video (“Hot temper leads to Queens death - New York Post”) fits into my larger issue of a “poison gold leaf” might not have been as clear as I would have wanted it to be. Another issue was the use of textual sources we were given. In my first essay, it was clear that I did not know how to use some of these—this is a matter of reading comprehension. Secondly, because the way I tried to get them to “speak” to each other failed the first time, I did not really do this in the second; this is something I have to keep practicing. Instead, what we have are what feel like parenthetical comments on what so-and-so author would have said about something I assert in my essay.
Articulating Future Goals: Better textual analysis, not only sothat I know how to use the sources, but also to learn how to get them to speak to each other. I do not feel that my transition between ideas, from the smaller scale to the larger, was all that clear. I think next time I am going to keep the “action/inaction” sentence strategy; maybe forcing myself to look at my sentences on a smaller scale will help me see the relationship between them. Even though I had an exhibit, it was not all that clear what I was trying to do with it. I suppose, for the next essay, that it should be most clear to myself, from draft one, what my exhibit can do for my stakes (which, in this essay, I also feel is not obvious).