Jonathan Franzen’s Novel, The Corrections, is a satiric tale of American culture, the lack of values, and the absolute obsession with consumer goods and consumption. It is told through the lives of the Lambert family, and their constant needs to “correct” various mistakes in their lives and behavior. The novel, published in 2001, comments on the social ills of American society; the dependence on world financial markets, new technologies, entitlement programs, big business, and of course, consumerism. While the novel is extreme in its commentary, and sweeping in its size, it is through the recent life of Chip Lambert that we can see parallels to the current U.S. economic situation, and the potential for further disasters.
Chip Lambert is the youngest son of the family. He was on tenure-track as a University professor, but due to the sexual manipulations of one of his students, lost his job and was disgraced. He continually borrows money from his sister, works as a part time copy editor for Warren Street Journal (his mother believing he works for the WSJ), and he has penned a horrible screenplay. As we are introduced to Chip, we see absolutely no redeeming value in his life. What was once considered a shinning academic career has spiraled downward.
As Chip picks his parents up from the airport, on their way to a fall cruise, a new opportunity begins to present itself. The boss of Chip’s ex-girlfriend introduces him to Gitanas Misevicius, a former diplomat for Lithuania. Gitanas is in New York attempting to find an American to assist in a fraudulent scheme; an attempt to sell U.S. investors on the rich natural resources of Lithuania, mainly sand and gravel. The country has experienced a collapse, coinciding with Russia...
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... are blind to the injustices of it all. The only difference that Chip could see was that in American, “the wealthy … subdued the unwealthy” (441) with gadgets, entertainment, and the all important gospel of consumerism. Chip found it refreshing in Lithuania though, because at least in that country, the one with the most guns won. There was not any ambiguity or rhetoric involved, like that of the United States.
The totality and completeness of Franzen’s The Corrections is almost too much to handle. He offers views on the “corrections” people make in their behaviors, in macro-economic and political situations, and in their imbalances. He takes on the power elite, the pharmaceutical companies, and society’s overall need to find solace and contentment in consumption of goods and it is within those comments that the true theme of his book shines brightly through.
Frederick Lewis Allen’s book tells in great detail how the average American would have lived in the 1930’s. He covers everything from fashion to politics and everything in between. He opens with a portrait of American life on September 3, 1929, the day before the first major stock market crash. His telling of the events immediately preceding and following this crash, and the ensuing panic describe a scene which was unimaginable before.
The dawn of the 20th century was met with an unprecedented catastrophe: an international technological war. Such a horrible conflict perhaps threatened the roots of the American Dream! Yet, most do not realize how pivotal the following years were. Post war prosperity caused a fabulous age for America: the “roaring twenties”. But it also was an era where materialism took the nation by storm, rooting itself into daily life. Wealth became a measure of success and a facade for social status. This “Marxist materialism” threatened the traditional American Dream of self-reliance and individuality far even more than the war a decade before. As it morphed into materialistic visions (owning a beautiful house and car), victims of the change blindly chased the new aspiration; one such victim was Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. As his self-earned luxury and riches clashed with love, crippling consequences and disasters occur. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby delves into an era of materialism, exploring how capitalism can become the face of social life and ultimately cloud the American Dream.
Tocqueville wrote that Americans are inherently more materialistic than European peoples for three reasons. First, Americans have freed themselves by rejecting “a territorial aristocracy” of hierarchical societal structures on the “soil of America.” By doing so, “the distinctions of ranks are obliterated and privileges are destroyed,” therefore causing “the desire of acquiring the comforts of the world” to haunt “the imagination of the poor, and the dread of losing them that of the rich.” Second, in an egalitarian society, where every citizen has an equal opportunity “the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest are marked enough to hurt i...
At first, the narrator conforms to the uneventful and dull capitalist society. He fines success in his work at an automobile manufacture, has obtained a large portion of his Ikea catalog, and has an expansive wardrobe. He is defined by his possessions and has no identity outside his furniture, which he remarks, “I wasn’t the only slave of my nesting instincts” (Palahniuk, 43) and “I am stupid, and all I do is want and need things.” (Palahniuk, 146) For the narrator, there is no fine line between the consumer [narrator] and the product. His life at the moment is a cycle of earning a wage, purchasing products, and representing himself through his purchases. “When objects and persons exist as equivalent to the same system, one loses the idea of other, and with it, any conception of self or privacy.” (Article, 2) The narrator loses sight of his own identity; he has all these material goods, but lacks the qu...
Society today is split in many different ways: the smart and the dumb, the pretty and the ugly, the popular and the awkward, and of course the rich and the poor. This key difference has led to many areas of conflict among the population. The rich and the poor often have different views on issues, and have different problems within their lives. Moral decay and materialism are two issues prevalent among the wealthy, while things such as socio-economic class conflict and the American dream may be more important to those without money. Ethics and responsibilities are an area of thought for both classes, with noblesse oblige leaning more towards the wealthy.
What seems to go unnoticed by many Americans is the evident and growing wealth gap. According to Pew Research Center, the current U.S. income is at its highest since 1928. This large dispersion of wealth can be attributed by the “fall [of the] routine producers” (Reich). Where jobs that were once attainable during the 70s are declining due to advancing technology and corporations finding workers in poor countries who are willing to work at half the cost of the routine producers. What also drives this wealth gap is the power of corporations in an age of extravagant consumerism. Through media, the demand to buy what we want is unavoidable. Corporations are able to gain revenue while people go unemployed because of America’s vast opportunities to buy what we want when we want it.
Many different facets compose the makeup of a prison community. One of the main components of the prison culture is the correctional officer. The individuals that are responsible for the security at correctional facilities such as a prison are better known as CO’s or correctional officers. Typically, the higher the security levels of the prison, the lower the ratio of inmates to correctional officers. “State averages of inmates to COs range from about 3.5 to 1 up to 8 to 1 (with national averages of 5.4 to 1 in 2000), but these numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt” (Foster, 2006, p.164). With the aforementioned disparity with the number of COs to inmates naturally safety concerns arise when it comes to keeping both COs and inmates working and living in a safe environment.
“, he uses logos to appeal to his readers. He goes on to say how Americans over confidence in their country caused them to believe that they are superior to the rest of the world and that America established and achieved the notion of freedom, making our lives to be superior and better than everywhere else in the world. Then, he pulls the rug under the readers feet by saying well this is not true. He cites multiple sources that suggest otherwise. For instance, America being placed as sixteenth on the international quality of life ranking, America’s murder ,other violent crime, and incarceration rates greater than most of the cultivated world. While there education and technical literacy is so low it’s humiliating. Some Americans having trouble really critically thinking when it comes to most of the social issues and act irrationally with no justification of their actions. For instance, after justice did not prevail at first during the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore and other following altercations, many young African Americans began to riot, loot, and destroy their own community. Due to the lack of education provided to their community to give them the tools and ability to think rationally, they let their emotions and animalistic nature to
The author juxtaposes the rich and poor with those in between in order to convince the audience, the middle class, that they should follow in the footsteps of both those richer and poorer than them in order to cease their materialistic attitudes. Near the end of the essay, Eighner states, “I think this is an attitude I share with the very wealthy—we both know there is plenty more where what we have came from. Between us are the rat-race millions who have confounded their selves with the objects they grasp and who nightly scavenge the cable channels looking for they know not what.” The author is stating that the wealthy and the homeless are both aware that there are things more important in life than tangible objects. Everyone else, however, has not made this connection yet and still searches, meaninglessly, for something of value. The middle class is often known to aspire to...
Americans have come to the “resolution” of borrowing money to pay off debt. This also comes into play as what gas lead Americans to stop saving all they have earned, and spend both what they receive and borrow, These “resolutions” have brought Americans to an end stage crisis. It then leads to requirements of corrupt capitalism (3).
In the essay The Chosen People, Stewart Ewen, discusses his perspective of middle class America. Specifically, he explores the idea that the middle class is suffering from an identity crisis. According to Ewen’s theory, “the notion of personal distinction [in America] is leading to an identity crisis” of the non-upper class. (185) The source of this identity crisis is mass consumerism. As a result of the Industrial Revolution and mass production, products became cheaper and therefore more available to the non-elite classes. “Mass production was investing individuals with tools of identity, marks of personhood.” (Ewen 187) Through advertising, junk mail and style industries, the middle class is always striving for “a stylistic affinity to wealth,” finding “delight in the unreal,” and obsessed with “cheap luxury items.” (Ewen 185-6) In other words, instead of defining themselves based on who they are on the inside, the people of middle class America define themselves in terms of external image and material possessions.
One major issue with the nation is their emphasis on the importance of having a timocracy society where power is measured and gained through wealth. A common ideology shared among Americans is “You don’t share things in common; you have your own things” (Burgess 236). Through this statement, Burgess remarks about how American citizens no longer have the will to familiarize themselves with
“The history of correctional thought and practice has been marked by enthusiasm for new approaches, disillusionment with these approaches, and then substitution of yet other tactics”(Clear 59). During the mid 1900s, many changes came about for the system of corrections in America. Once a new idea goes sour, a new one replaces it. Prisons shifted their focus from the punishment of offenders to the rehabilitation of offenders, then to the reentry into society, and back to incarceration. As times and the needs of the criminal justice system changed, new prison models were organized in hopes of lowering the crime rates in America. The three major models of prisons that were developed were the medical, model, the community model, and the crime control model.
To some characters like chip, the status quo is evil and everyone else but him are all sheep. Even then, he only keeps up this persona of being against ‘the man’ when he’s really conforming into what he thinks others expect him to be.
... can carry out the task of a prison administrator. This position is key as there are the drivers to improving the facility and treatment of prisoners.