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Satirical Techniques - Glossary  Amplification: the repetition of a word or expression while adding more detail to it, in order to emphasise what might otherwise be passed over.  Anticlimax: a drop in importance or tone where one would expect a climax to be. Antithesis:  a figure of speech with ...

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style, texts and context, satire notes, metalanguage task, satire mix, quotes about politics,

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Glossary Mix and Match Cut up the table so that students need to find the right meanings to the term. Amplification: the repetition of a word or expression while adding more detail to it, in order to emphasise what might otherwise be passed over. Anticlimax: a drop in importance or tone...

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Conventions of Science Fiction and Brave New World It is useful at this point to consider some common conventions of science fiction: verisimilitude sense of wonder cognitive estrangement alienation seeding the text lone super hero helpless heroine evil Villain invented lexicon emotive language i...

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Orwell vs. Huxley (1984 vs Brave New World)

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Post with 37235 views. Orwell vs. Huxley (1984 vs Brave New World)

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Categories of Audience Descriptions of audience for Brave New World  Gender male- masculine, hard-working, providing  female - nurturing, cleaning (housework)  Sexuality homosexuality illegal, VERY hetero Political systems capitalism,  Race predominantly white, other races seen a...

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Overview Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a satirical vision of a future that is bleak and unwelcoming. The science fiction novel is dystopian or anti utopian in tone and subject matter. The title is drawn from the Shakespearean play The Tempest but instead of referring to an idyllic is...

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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EPIGRAPH   Les utopies apparaissent bien plus réalisables qu'on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: comment éviter leur réalisation définitive?…  Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un ...

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How does The Majestic Plastic bag present a serious political perspective in a way that positions the audience to accept the message without question? Observe Initial impressions content themes issues Engage Personal response  Analysis and explanation  Critical Analysis Personal evaluatio...

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Message about the relationship between representation and meaning.   What is the political perspective, idea, event or situation being represented? What omissions and inclusions are made. How is an authoritative voice constructed and verisimilitude created?  How is the political perspecti...

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How do representations construct a particular perspective of reality?

How does Brave New World provide significant insight into the world of Huxley?

How are Huxley’s concerns about political systems reflected in the construction of Brave New World?

How does Brave New World challenge the way you think about political perspectives, events or situations?

How does the study of related text(s) reinforce/challenge your analysis of the ways people and politics are represented?

How does the contextual framework shape the legitimacy of your related text(s)?

How has studying Representations of People and Politics deepened your understanding of the world?

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In this elective, students explore and evaluate various representations of people and politics in their prescribed text and other related texts of their own choosing. They consider the ways in which texts represent individual, shared or competing political perspectives, ideas, events or situations. Students analyse representations of people’s political motivations and actions, as well as the impact political acts may have on individual lives or society more broadly. In their responding and composing, students develop their understanding of how the relationship between various textual forms, media of production and language choices influences and shapes meaning.

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This module requires students to explore various representations of events, personalities or situations. They evaluate how medium of production, textual form, perspective and choice of language influence meaning. The study develops students’ understanding of the relationships between representation and meaning.

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All texts are deliberately constructed to convey an agenda.

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Reporter's Notebook

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FORDLÂNDIA, Brazil - The Amazon jungle already swallowed the Winding Brook Golf Course. Floods ravaged the cemetery, leaving behind a stockpile of concrete crosses. The 100-bed hospital designed by the acclaimed Detroit architect Albert Kahn? Plunderers destroyed it.

Given the scale of decay and decrepitude in this town - founded in 1928 by the industrialist Henry Ford in the far reaches of the Amazon River Basin - I didn't expect to come across the stately, largely well-preserved homes on Palm Avenue. But there they were, thanks to the squatters.

"This street was a looters' paradise, with thieves taking furniture, doorknobs, anything the Americans left behind," said Expedito Duarte de Brito, 71, a retired milkman who dwells in one of the homes built for Ford managers in what was planned to be a utopian plantation town. "I thought, 'Either I occupy this piece of history or it joins the other ruins of Fordlândia.'"

That finally changed when I boarded a riverboat this year in Santarém, an outpost at the confluence of the Amazon and Tapajós rivers, and made the six-hour trip to the place where Ford, one of the world's richest men, tried turning a colossal swath of Brazilian jungle into a Midwest fantasyland.

I explored the outpost on foot, wandering the ruins and talking to gold prospectors, farmers and descendants of plantation workers who live here. Hardly a lost city, Fordlândia is home to about 2,000 people, some who live in the crumbling structures built nearly a century ago.

Ford, the automobile manufacturer who is considered a founder of American industrial mass-production methods, hatched his plan for Fordlândia in a bid to produce his own source of the rubber needed for making tires and car parts like valves, hoses and gaskets.

In doing so, he waded into an industry shaped by imperialism and claims of botanical subterfuge. Brazil was home to Hevea brasiliensis, the coveted rubber tree, and the Amazon Basin had boomed from 1879 to 1912 as industries in North America and Europe fed the demand for rubber.

But to the dismay of Brazil's leaders, Henry Wickham, a British botanist and explorer, had spirited thousands of Hevea seeds out of Santarém, providing the genetic stock for rubber plantations in British, Dutch and French colonies in Asia.

These endeavors on the other side of the world devastated Brazil's rubber economy. But Ford despised relying on the Europeans, fearing a proposal by Winston Churchill to create a rubber cartel. So, in a move that pleased Brazilian officials, Ford acquired a giant stretch of land in the Amazon.

From the start, ineptitude and tragedy plagued the venture, meticulously documented in a book by the historian Greg Grandin that I read on the boat as it made its way up the Tapajós. Disdainful of experts who could have advised them on tropical agriculture, Ford's men planted seeds of questionable value and let leaf blight ravage the plantation.

Despite such setbacks, Ford constructed an American-style town, which he wanted inhabited by Brazilians hewing to what he considered American values.

Employees moved into clapboard bungalows - designed, of course, in Michigan - some of which are still standing. Streetlamps illuminated concrete sidewalks. Portions of these footpaths persist in the town, near red fire hydrants, in the shadow of decaying dance halls and crumbling warehouses.

"It turns out Detroit isn't the only place where Ford produced ruins," said Guilherme Lisboa, 67, the owner of a small inn called the Pousada Americana.

Beyond producing rubber, Ford, an avowed teetotaler, anti-Semite and skeptic of the Jazz Age, clearly wanted life in the jungle to be more transformative. His American managers forbade consumption of alcohol, while promoting gardening, square dancing and readings of the poetry of Emerson and Longfellow.

Going even further in Ford's quest for utopia, so-called sanitation squads operated across the outpost, killing stray dogs, draining puddles of water where malaria-transmitting mosquitoes could multiply and checking employees for venereal diseases.

"With a surety of purpose and incuriosity about the world that seems all too familiar, Ford deliberately rejected expert advice and set out to turn the Amazon into the Midwest of his imagination," Mr. Grandin, the historian, wrote in his account of the town.

These days, the ruins of Fordlândia stand as testament to the folly of trying to bend the jungle to the will of man.

Seeking to promote the automobile as a form of recreation - along with the golf course, tennis courts, a movie theater and swimming pools - managers laid out nearly 30 miles of roads around Fordlândia. But cars are mostly absent on the town's muddy lanes, eclipsed by the motorbikes found in towns across the Amazon.

By the end of World War II, it was clear that cultivating rubber trees around Fordlândia could not be profitable in the face of leaf blight and competition from synthetic rubber and Asian plantations freed from Japanese domination.

After Ford turned the town over to Brazil's government in 1945, officials transferred Fordlândia from one public agency to another, largely for unsuccessful experiments in tropical agriculture. The town went into a seemingly perpetual state of decline.

"Nothing happens here, and that's how I like it," said Joaquim Pereira da Silva, 73, a farmer from Minas Gerais State who followed his star to Fordlândia in 1997. Now he lives on Palm Avenue in an old American house he bought for 20,000 reais (about $6,670) from a squatter who fixed it up.

"The Americans had no idea about rubber but they knew how to build things to last," he said.

Something about the failed utopia strikes a chord with scholars and artists in other parts of the world. Fordlândia inspired a 2008 album by the Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson and a 1997 novel by Eduardo Sguiglia about an Argentine adventurer who travels here to recruit plantation laborers.

Some descendants of workers who settled in Fordlândia, along with new migrants from other parts in Brazil, have small plots where zebu cattle graze. Others plant manioc in areas where rubber trees were chopped down decades ago. Many survive on small social welfare payments or pensions.

Then there are residents like Eduardo Silva dos Santos, born 66 years ago in the hospital conceived by Kahn, the architect who designed much of 20th-century Detroit. Mr. dos Santos now lives in a small house near the hospital's ruins.

Scavenging material left by the Americans, he fashioned a fishing lantern from old car parts and a spice grinder from discarded machinery. Mr. dos Santos expressed mixed views of Fordlândia under American stewardship, growing up in the years after Ford unloaded the town.

"This place in Ford's day was clean, no insects, no animals, no jungle in the town," said Mr. dos Santos, one of 11 children born to a family that depended on the rubber plantation.

"My father worked for them," he said, "and he did what they ordered him to do. Workers are like dogs: They obey."

But to Ford's dismay, sometimes they didn't obey.

Managers tried enforcing the alcohol prohibition, but workers simply hopped on boats to a so-called island of innocence nearby with bars and brothels. And in 1930, workers fed up with eating Ford's diet of oatmeal, canned peaches and brown rice in a sweltering dining hall staged a full-scale riot.

They smashed time clocks, cut electricity to the plantation and chanted, "Brazil for Brazilians; kill all the Americans," forcing some of the managers to decamp into the jungle.

The Amazon offered its own challenges to the Americans. Some couldn't adapt to the conditions here, suffering nervous breakdowns. One drowned when a storm on the Tapajós River toppled his boat. Another manager left after three of his children died from tropical fevers.

Ford might have avoided such tragedies, and the ruinous management of the plantation, if he had sought counsel from specialists in caring for rubber trees or scholars of the Amazon's capacity to thwart grandiose ventures. But he seemed to abhor learning from the past.

"History is bunk," Ford told The New York Times in 1921. "What difference does it make how many times the ancient Greeks flew their kites?"

Paula Moura contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Deep in the Brazilian Amazon, Exploring the Ruins of Ford's Fantasyland. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Deep in Brazil's Amazon, Exploring the Ruins of Ford's Fantasyland

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Reporter's Notebook FORDLÂNDIA, Brazil - The Amazon jungle already swallowed the Winding Brook Golf Course. Floods ravaged the cemetery, leaving behind a stockpile of concrete crosses. The 100-bed hospital designed by the acclaimed Detroit architect Albert Kahn? Plunderers destroyed it.

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I'm a black woman of a certain age, a divorced mom of two teenagers who has no choice but to focus daily on the challenges of keeping a home, my family and myself on track. I'm college educated, work in media communications, am precariously middle class - and I am tired of what I witness of today's feminism.

I'd hoped that the Women's March might help me update my perception of feminism, at least as it is commonly portrayed and disseminated of late.

I'd followed the back and forth in the alternative and mainstream press during its hurried, urgent formation, and chalked up reports about internal squabbles over the race and class makeup of the group's leadership to the same kind of growing pains that beset every activist group that I've ever followed or covered during my years in newsrooms. But now, a month after the Women's March masterfully pulled off a massive protest in D.C. that also inspired similar ones in major American and global cities, my nascent investigation of the March 8 "general strike" and "Day Without Women" raised only more concerns, and a few questions, all located in what I see as a big void in today's marketing-driven expression of "feminism."

At this moment, whether expressed by the second-wave, Gloria Steinem wing, or the third-wave corporatist Sheryl Sandberg arm, or the rowdy, genitalia-obsessed Lena Dunham arm, it seems that "feminism" in 2017 is more concerned with promoting superficial trappings of genuine equality than with doing the tough work required to address the hard, cold facts of gender and racial inequality.

For example, across all U.S. occupations, women's median weekly earnings are $706 per week, compared with $860 for men, and the top 30 occupations for women cover a range of essential - but relatively low-paying - jobs such as elementary school teachers, administrative assistants, customer service representatives and retail sales, according to the most recent data available (2013) from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics Women's Bureau. And, while black and Latina women together make up nearly 18 million of the total number of America's 67 million working women, they are disproportionately more likely to be heads of households, yet also more likely to receive less pay than white women and white men.

Moreover, in addition to stubborn disparities in the workforce and incomes, women of color see huge gaps between themselves and white men and women in health outcomes and other key life-expectancy indicators.

The Women's March, while apparently "led" by a diverse collection of black, white, Latina and Asian women from across age groups, is the latest entry in a recent bumper crop of "feminist movements," "collectives," "initiatives" that claim inclusivity and egalitarian principles, but which somehow always seem tone-deaf, at best, to the daily, on-the-ground realities of nonfamous black women and Latinas.

How, then, will working-class black women and Latinas respond to the idea of missing a day of work in a general strike as part of political resistance? It is a case of high-minded ideology that, while well-meaning, doesn't take into account the fact that some women can't miss even a single day of work without fear of being fired or docked a full day's pay. Consider that the " Day Without Immigrants," on Feb. 16 - organized by disparate workers' and immigrant rights organizations in response to President Trump's proposal to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, and to impose a strict immigration ban on seven Middle Eastern nations - resulted in private companies in several cities firing dozens of workers who participated in the boycott.

While the symbolism of the "Day Without Immigrants" is certainly valuable, for the immigrant and women workers who got fired for participating, and who now must find new jobs, you have to wonder if they now genuinely believe they received appropriate return on their investment. I have similar concerns about the upcoming "Day Without Women." As Jessa Crispin noted in a recent essay, "the pro-woman power elite peers deeply into the savage inequalities of American life and asks, 'Where's my half of the profits?' "

Akin to the debate over white privilege, the debate over feminism is similarly stuck in a binary construct, largely defined in middle- or upper-middle-class white-lady contexts. Variations exist along generational lines: See the Lena Dunham crowd contrasted against the Steinem wing. But the marketing of modern feminism, and the oxygen-sucking place it holds in the public imagination, is largely occupied by white women.

The occasional invocation of Audre Lorde, Fannie Lou Hamer or Angela Davis by some leaders within these status quo or emerging white feminist camps in 2017 is notable - if also to me superficial and insufficient. (Yes, I know Davis is among a group of women who are advocating for a general strike.)

Today's purveyors of hashtag feminism exemplified by pink "pussy hats," safety pins and cheeky-ballsy slogans on T-shirts have forgotten that women of color have to learn how to navigate their own universes but also those of white women and men to literally be able to pay the rent and afford decent schools. We have to succeed in both spheres not only to achieve success, but to fundamentally cope. To ask us, then, to participate in a Lysistrata-like action makes me wonder if the gesture is designed more to give white ladies another opportunity for displaying unity, a kind of safari solidarity, than it is to provide women of color and working-class women tangible relief.

However out of fashion it is to say so in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, identity politics are inherently personal. Identity politics do, in fact, drive political outcomes, which in turn drive policy, economic and social developments.

I don't now and never have viewed the conventional version of feminism as a defining part of my identity; rather, based on what I have experienced and learned from the black women I've known my entire life, I have absorbed a degree of resilience, appreciation for common sense, and unflashy problem-solving that many women of color demonstrate. It is no accident that Black Lives Matter was co-founded by Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors in the wake of the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Within the span of two years, BLM expanded into an effort to organize the energies and intellect of people of color and whites toward strategically resisting police brutality and other American institutions where systemic race and gender discrimination put us at risk. The energy and determination of BLM, its ability to spur dozens of protests nationwide since 2014, garnering condemnations from some police unions and elected politicians, seems to have inspired organizers of the Women's March without, apparently, deeply informing the group about the full range of potential negative consequences for participants.

Telling also is the group's tepid nod to intersectionality, the concept coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a black legal scholar, which has informed the positions and actions of many emerging protest movements in recent years. Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality - the critical analysis of gender, ethnic and class aspects that drive inequality in populations and social structures - was earlier identified as "interlocking" factors by Chicana playwright Cherríe Moraga. This intellectual trait, the ability to recognize the multidimensional layers of inequality, are bedrocks of effective leadership across disciplines - although when demonstrated by women of color they are rarely characterized as such by the dominant society.

Today's iteration of feminism might gain wider credibility by recognizing and adopting core aspects of women of color's experiences: resilience, self-love and fundamental understanding that one's self-worth is not defined by the same markers of success that have defined white male status since the beginning of time in America.
Amy Alexander, an award-winning writer and editor, is the author of four nonfiction books, including Uncovering Race: A Black Journalist's Story of Reporting and Reinvention. Follow her @amyalex63.

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Today's Feminism: Too Much Marketing, Not Enough Reality

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast I'm a black woman of a certain age, a divorced mom of two teenagers who has no choice but to focus daily on the challenges of keeping a home, my family and myself on track.

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Over the last year, as the presidential campaign grew increasingly bizarre and Donald Trump took us places we had never been before, I saw a spike in media references to Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book written by my late father, Neil Postman, which anticipated back in 1985 so much about what has become of our current public discourse.

At Forbes, one contributor wrote that the book "may help explain the otherwise inexplicable". CNN noted that Trump's allegedly shocking "ascent would not have surprised Postman". At ChristianPost.com, Richard D Land reflected on reading the book three decades ago and feeling "dumbfounded ... by Postman's prophetic insights into what was then America's future and is now too often a painful description of America's present". Last month, a headline at Paste Magazine asked: " Did Neil Postman Predict the Rise of Trump and Fake News? "

Colleagues and former students of my father, who taught at New York University for more than 40 years and who died in 2003, would now and then email or Facebook message me, after the latest Trumpian theatrics, wondering, "What would Neil think?" or noting glumly, "Your dad nailed it."

The central argument of Amusing Ourselves is simple: there were two landmark dystopian novels written by brilliant British cultural critics - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell - and we Americans had mistakenly feared and obsessed over the vision portrayed in the latter book (an information-censoring, movement-restricting, individuality-emaciating state) rather than the former (a technology-sedating, consumption-engorging, instant-gratifying bubble).

The misplaced focus on Orwell was understandable: after all, for decades the cold war had made communism - as embodied by Nineteen Eighty-Four's Big Brother - the prime existential threat to America and to the greatest of American virtues, freedom. And, to put a bow on it, the actual year, 1984, was fast approaching when my father was writing his book, so we had Orwell's powerful vision on the brain.

Whoops. Within a half-decade, the Berlin Wall came down. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.

"We were keeping our eye on 1984," my father wrote. "When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares."

Unfortunately, there remained a vision we Americans did need to guard against, one that was percolating right then, in the 1980s. The president was a former actor and polished communicator. Our political discourse (if you could call it that) was day by day diminished to soundbites ("Where's the beef?" and "I'm paying for this microphone" became two "gotcha" moments, apparently testifying to the speaker's political formidableness).

The nation increasingly got its "serious" information not from newspapers, which demand a level of deliberation and active engagement, but from television: Americans watched an average of 20 hours of TV a week. (My father noted that USA Today, which launched in 1982 and featured colorized images, quick-glance lists and charts, and much shorter stories, was really a newspaper mimicking the look and feel of TV news.)

But it wasn't simply the magnitude of TV exposure that was troubling. It was that the audience was being conditioned to get its information faster, in a way that was less nuanced and, of course, image-based. As my father pointed out, a written sentence has a level of verifiability to it: it is true or not true - or, at the very least, we can have a meaningful discussion over its truth. (This was pre-truthiness, pre-" alternative facts ".)

But an image? One never says a picture is true or false. It either captures your attention or it doesn't. The more TV we watched, the more we expected - and with our finger on the remote, the more we demanded - that not just our sitcoms and cop procedurals and other "junk TV" be entertaining but also our news and other issues of import. Digestible. Visually engaging. Provocative. In short, amusing. All the time. Sorry, C-Span.

This was, in spirit, the vision that Huxley predicted way back in 1931, the dystopia my father believed we should have been watching out for. He wrote:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

1984 - the year, not the novel - looks positively quaint now. One-third of a century later, we all carry our own personalized screens on us, at all times, and rather than seven broadcast channels plus a smattering of cable, we have a virtual infinity of options.

Today, the average weekly screen time for an American adult - brace yourself; this is not a typo - is 74 hours (and still going up). We watch when we want, not when anyone tells us, and usually alone, and often while doing several other things. The soundbite has been replaced by virality, meme, hot take, tweet. Can serious national issues really be explored in any coherent, meaningful way in such a fragmented, attention-challenged environment?

Sure, times change. Technology and innovation wait for no man. Get with the program. But how engaged can any populace be when the most we're asked to do is to like or not like a particular post, or "sign" an online petition? How seriously should anyone take us, or should we take ourselves, when the "optics" of an address or campaign speech - raucousness, maybe actual violence, childishly attention-craving gestures or facial expressions - rather than the content of the speech determines how much "airtime" it gets, and how often people watch, share and favorite it?

My father's book warned of what was coming, but others have seen and feared aspects of it, too (Norbert Wiener, Sinclair Lewis, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, David Foster Wallace, Sherry Turkle, Douglas Rushkoff, Naomi Klein, Edward Snowden, to name a few).

Our public discourse has become so trivialized, it's astounding that we still cling to the word "debates" for what our presidential candidates do onstage when facing each other. Really? Who can be shocked by the rise of a reality TV star, a man given to loud, inflammatory statements, many of which are spectacularly untrue but virtually all of which make for what used to be called "good television"?

Who can be appalled when the coin of the realm in public discourse is not experience, thoughtfulness or diplomacy but the ability to amuse - no matter how maddening or revolting the amusement?

So, yes, my dad nailed it. Did he also predict that the leader we would pick for such an age, when we had become perhaps terminally enamored of our technologies and amusements, would almost certainly possess fascistic tendencies? I believe he called this, too.

For all the ways one can define fascism (and there are many), one essential trait is its allegiance to no idea of right but its own: it is, in short, ideological narcissism. It creates a myth that is irrefutable (much in the way that an image's "truth" cannot be disproved), in perpetuity, because of its authoritarian, unrestrained nature.

"Television is a speed-of-light medium, a present-centered medium," my father wrote. "Its grammar, so to say, permits no access to the past ... history can play no significant role in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions."

Later in that passage, Czesław Miłosz, winner of the Nobel prize for literature, is cited for remarking in his 1980 acceptance speech that that era was notable for "a refusal to remember"; my father notes Miłosz referencing "the shattering fact that there are now more than one hundred books in print that deny that the Holocaust ever took place".

Again: how quaint.

While fake news has been with us as long as there have been agendas, and from both sides of the political aisle, we're now witnessing - thanks to Breitbart News, Infowars and perpetuation of myths like the one questioning Barack Obama's origins - a sort of distillation, a fine-tuning.

"An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan," my father wrote. "Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us ... [but] who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?"

I wish I could tell you that, for all his prescience, my father also supplied a solution. He did not. He saw his job as identifying a serious, under-addressed problem, then asking a set of important questions about the problem. He knew it would be hard to find an easy answer to the damages wrought by "technopoly". It was a systemic problem, one baked as much into our individual psyches as into our culture.

But we need more than just hope for a way out. We need a strategy, or at least some tactics.

First: treat false allegations as an opportunity. Seek information as close to the source as possible. The internet represents a great chance for citizens to do their own hunting - there's ample primary source material, credible eyewitnesses, etc, out there - though it can also be manipulated to obfuscate that. No one's reality, least of all our collective one, should be a grotesque game of telephone.

Second: don't expect "the media" to do this job for you. Some of its practitioners do, brilliantly and at times heroically. But most of the media exists to sell you things. Its allegiance is to boosting circulation, online traffic, ad revenue. Don't begrudge it that. But then don't be suckered about the reasons why Story X got play and Story Y did not.

Third: for journalists, Jay Rosen, a former student of my father's and a leading voice in the movement known as "public journalism", offers several useful, practical suggestions.

Finally, and most importantly, it should be the responsibility of schools to make children aware of our information environments, which in many instances have become our entertainment environments, but there is little evidence that schools are equipped or care to do this. So someone has to.

We must teach our children, from a very young age, to be skeptics, to listen carefully, to assume everyone is lying about everything. (Well, maybe not everyone.) Check sources. Consider what wasn't said. Ask questions. Understand that every storyteller has a bias - and so does every platform.

We all laughed - some of us, anyway - at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's version of the news, to some extent because everything had become a joke. If we wish not to be "soma"-tized (Huxley's word) by technology, to be something less than smiling idiots and complicit in the junking of our own culture, then "what is required of us now is a new era of responsibility ... giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship."

My father didn't write those last words - our recently retired president said them in his final inaugural address. He's right. It will be difficult. It's not so amusing any more.
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My dad predicted Trump in 1985 - it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World

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Over the last year, as the presidential campaign grew increasingly bizarre and Donald Trump took us places we had never been before, I saw a spike in media references to Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book written by my late father, Neil Postman, which anticipated back in 1985 so much about what has become of our current public discourse.

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As I have shown, man was born with a right to perfect freedom, and with an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature, equally with any other man or men in the world. So he has by nature a power not only

to preserve his property, that is,

his life,

liberty and

possessions, against harm from other men, but

to judge and punish breaches of the law of nature by others-punishing in the manner he thinks the offence deserves, even punishing with death crimes that he thinks are so dreadful as to deserve it.Q1

But no political society can exist or survive without having in itself the power to preserve the property-and therefore to punish the offences-of all the members of that society; and so there can't be a political society except where every one of the members has given up this natural power, passing it into the hands of the community in all cases.... With all private judgments of every particular member of the society being excluded, the community comes to be the umpire. It acts in this role

according to settled standing rules, impartially,[1] the same to all parties; acting

through men who have authority from the community to apply those rules. This 'umpire' settles all the disputes that may arise between members of the society concerning any matter of right, and punishes offences that any member has committed against the society, with penalties that the law has established.Q2

This makes it easy to tell who are and who aren't members of a political society. Those who

are united into one body with a common established law and judiciary to appeal to, with authority to decide controversies and punish offenders,

are in civil society with one another; whereas those who have no such common appeal (I mean: no such appeal here on earth)

are still in the state of nature, each having to judge and to carry out the sentence, because there isn't anyone else to do those things for him.Q3

That's how it comes about that the commonwealth has

the power of making laws: that is,

the power to set down what punishments are appropriate for what crimes that members of the society commit; and

the power of war and peace: that is, the power to punish any harm done to any of its members by anyone who isn't a member; all this being done for the preservation of the property of all the members of the society, as far as is possible. Every man who has entered into civil society has thereby relinquished his power to punish offences against the law of nature on the basis of his own private judgment,

giving it to the legislature in all cases; and along with that he has also

given to the commonwealth a right to call on him to employ his force for the carrying out of its judgments (which are really his own judgments, for they are made by himself or by his representative).Q4

So we have the distinction between the

legislative and

executive powers of civil society. The former are used to judge, by

standing laws, how far offences committed within the commonwealth are to be punished; the latter are used to determine, by

occasional judgments based on particular circumstances, how far harms from outside the commonwealth are to be vindicated.

Each branch of a commonwealth's power can employ all the force of all its members, when there is a need for it. Q5

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As I have shown, man was born with a right to perfect freedom, and with an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature, equally with any other man or men in the world.

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The novel through the characterisation of Helmholtz encourages audiences to empathise with his desire to question and experience the world in order to represent it effectively which is the purpose of the documentary to encourage young people to enact change in the world by presenting the 'yippies' perspective as the ideal. In this way, both texts despite different forms and contexts clearly convey the idea that it is through authentically engaging with the world that you can represent it and therefore have motivations that can make political ideologies worthwhile.

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Historical Figures Allusions In Brave New World Flashcards | Quizlet

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Start studying Historical Figures Allusions In Brave New World. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley : Monarch Notes

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The Monarch study guide to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

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Silke Horst's approach is undoubtedly somewhat better: she selects excerpts from five chapters-to the exclusion of the rest of the text, which means that her teaching model has to be changed and sup­plemented.

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Power
BY AUDRE LORDE

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles
and my stomach
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.

A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said "Die you little motherfucker" and
there are tapes to prove it. At his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
"I didn't notice the size nor nothing else
only the color". And
there are tapes to prove that, too.

Today that 37 year old white man
with 13 years of police forcing
was set free
by eleven white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one Black Woman who said
"They convinced me" meaning
they had dragged her 4'10'' black Woman's frame
over the hot coals
of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go
the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.

I have not been able to touch the destruction
within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85 year old white woman
who is somebody's mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time
"Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are."

Audre Lorde, "Power" from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1978 by Audre Lorde. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Source: The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997)

A fantasy short story by Neil Gaiman that adapts the Sherlock Holmes story 'A Study in Scarlet.'

Non-Fiction:
1. Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee
by Chloe Hooper

In 2004 on Palm Island, an Aboriginal settlement in the "Deep North" of Australia, a thirty-six-year-old man named Cameron Doomadgee was arrested for swearing at a white police officer. Forty minutes later he was dead in the jailhouse. The police claimed he'd tripped on a step, but his liver was ruptured. The main suspect was Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley, a charismatic cop with long experience in Aboriginal communities and decorations for his work.

Fiction
1. Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution.

Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. Only Tóti, a priest Agnes has mysteriously chosen to be her spiritual guardian, seeks to understand her. But as Agnes's death looms, the farmer's wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they've heard.

2. Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Upon this slender factual scaffold, Brooks has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure.

3. I'm Not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti
On a dare, nine-year-old Michele Amitrano enters an old, abandoned farmhouse, where he stumbles upon a secret so terrible that he can't tell anybody. As the truth emerges, Michele learns that the horror in the creepy old house is closer to home than he ever imagined.

4. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, fraternal twins Esthappen and Rahel fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family. Their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu, (who loves by night the man her children love by day), fled an abusive marriage to live with their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), and their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt). When Chacko's English ex-wife brings their daughter for a Christmas visit, the twins learn that things can change in a day, that lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river...

5. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

6. Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

Film (check the ratings!)
1. Beasts of No Nation

2. The Ides of March (2011)

3. Snowpiercer (2014)

4. Children of Men (2006)

5. The Candidate (1972)

6. Selma (2015)

Graphic Novels
1. Persepolis
Persepolis is an autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi depicting her childhood up to her early adult years in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution.

2. Maus
Maus[a] is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work deploys postmodern techniques and represents Jews as mice and other Germans and Poles as cats and pigs. Critics have classified Maus as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992 it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.

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pindex | pinboard for learning | stephen fry | lhc | gcse | science

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Representing People and Politics: Brave New World

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Power BY AUDRE LORDE The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.

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"Without music life would be a mistake," Nietzsche proclaimed in 1889. But although a great many beloved writers have extolled the power of music with varying degrees of Nietzsche's bombast, no one has captured its singular enchantment more beautifully than Aldous Huxley (July, 26 1894-November 22, 1963). In his mid-thirties - just before the publication of Brave New World catapulted him into literary celebrity and a quarter century before his insightful writings about art and artists and his transcendent experience with hallucinogenic drugs - Huxley came to contemplate the mysterious transcendence at the heart of this most spiritually resonant of the arts. His meditations were eventually published as the 1931 treasure Music at Night and Other Essays (public library).

In a magnificent essay titled "The Rest Is Silence" - which inspired the title of Alex Ross's modern masterwork The Rest Is Noise - Huxley writes:

From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death - all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence.

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

In a parenthetical observation that calls to mind Susan Sontag on the aesthetics of silence, Huxley adds:

Silence is an integral part of all good music. Compared with Beethoven's or Mozart's, the ceaseless torrent of Wagner's music is very poor in silence. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it seems so much less significant than theirs. It "says" less because it is always speaking.

Huxley considers music's singular capacity for expressing the inexpressible:

In a different mode, or another plane of being, music is the equivalent of some of man's most significant and most inexpressible experiences. By mysterious analogy it evokes in the mind of the listener, sometimes the phantom of these experiences, sometimes even the experiences themselves in their full force of life - it is a question of intensity; the phantom is dim, the reality, near and burning. Music may call up either; it is chance or providence which decides. The intermittences of the heart are subject to no known law.

More than merely echoing our experience, Huxley argues, music enlarges it:

Listening to expressive music, we have, not of course the artist's original experience (which is quite beyond us, for grapes do not grow on thistles), but the best experience in its kind of which our nature is capable - a better and completer experience than in fact we ever had before listening to the music.

But the most complete experience of all, the only one superior to music, is silence:

When the inexpressible had to be expressed, Shakespeare laid down his pen and called for music. And if the music should also fail? Well, there was always silence to fall back on. For always, always and everywhere, the rest is silence.

In a different piece from the same collection, the uncommonly breathtaking title essay "Music at Night," Huxley revisits the subject of humanity's most powerful medium of expression:

Moonless, this June night is all the more alive with stars. Its darkness is perfumed with faint gusts from the blossoming lime trees, with the smell of wetted earth and the invisible greenness of the vines. There is silence; but a silence that breathes with the soft breathing of the sea and, in the thin shrill noise of a cricket, insistently, incessantly harps on the fact of its own deep perfection. Far away, the passage of a train is like a long caress, moving gently, with an inexorable gentleness, across the warm living body of the night.

[...]

Suddenly, by some miraculously appropriate confidence (for I had selected the record in the dark, without knowing what music the machine would play), suddenly the introduction to the Benedictus in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis begins to trace patterns on the moonless sky.

Huxley exhales:

The Benedictus. Blessed and blessing, this music is in some sort the equivalent of the night, of the deep and living darkness, into which, now in a single jet, now in a fine interweaving of melodies, now in pulsing and almost solid clots of harmonious sound, it pours itself, stanchlessly pours itself, like time, like the rising and falling, falling trajectories of a life. It is the equivalent of the night in another mode of being, as an essence is the equivalent of the flowers, from which it is distilled.

"Blessedness is within us all," Patti Smith wrote in her beautiful elegy for her soul mate, and it is the revelation of this blessedness that Huxley celebrates as music's highest power:

There is, at least there sometimes seems to be, a certain blessedness lying at the heart of things, a mysterious blessedness, of whose existence occasional accidents or providences (for me, this night is one of them) make us obscurely, or it may be intensely, but always fleetingly, alas, always only for a few brief moments aware. In the Benedictus Beethoven gives expression to this awareness of blessedness. His music is the equivalent of this Mediterranean night, or rather of the blessedness at the heart of the night, of the blessedness as it would be if it could be sifted clear of irrelevance and accident, refined and separated out into its quintessential purity.

I think immediately of Saul Bellow's spectacular Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he asserted: "Only art penetrates ... the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can't receive." For Huxley, no art swings open the gates of reception more powerfully than music - but the language in which it communicates to us that hidden, genuine reality is untranslatable into our ordinary language:

Music "says" things about the world, but in specifically musical terms. Any attempt to reproduce these musical statements "in our own words" is necessarily doomed to failure. We cannot isolate the truth contained in a piece of music; for it is a beauty-truth and inseparable from its partner. The best we can do is to indicate in the most general terms the nature of the musical beauty-truth under consideration and to refer curious truth-seekers to the original. Thus, the introduction to the Benedictus in the Missa Solemnis is a statement about the blessedness that is at the heart of things. But this is about as far as "our words" will take us. If we were to start describing in our "own words" exactly what Beethoven felt about this blessedness, how he conceived it, what he thought its nature to be, we should very soon find ourselves writing lyrical nonsense... Only music, and only Beethoven's music, and only this particular music of Beethoven, can tell us with any precision what Beethoven's conception of the blessedness at the heart of things actually was. If we want to know, we must listen - on a still June night, by preference, with the breathing of the invisible sea for background to the music and the scent of lime trees drifting through the darkness, like some exquisite soft harmony apprehended by another sense.

Although Music at Night and Other Essays belongs in the sad cemetery of life-giving books that have perished out of print, used copies are still findable and very much worth finding. Complement this particular portion with Henry Beston's exquisite love letter to nighttime, then revisit Huxley on the two types of truth artists must reconcile, how we become who we are, and his little-known children's book, then revisit other notable reflections on the power of music.

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Aldous Huxley on the Transcendent Power of Music and Why It Sings to Our Souls

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"Without music life would be a mistake," Nietzsche proclaimed in 1889. But although a great many beloved writers have extolled the power of music with varying degrees of Nietzsche's bombast, no one has captured its singular enchantment more beautifully than Aldous Huxley (July, 26 1894-November 22, 1963).