Believers of the Old and New Testaments claim that violence is a sin and can only lead to more brutality and death; poet Tony Barnstone firmly agrees. In his poem “Parable in Praise of Violence” Barnstone lambastes the American obsession with violence-- that it is often triggered by inevitable events which could be handled in different manners. The speaker in “Parable in Praise of Violence” reflects on all parts of his “sinful” culture and comes to the realization that people often use violence as a way to deal with emotions of grief and anger caused by events and concepts they cannot explain. The blunt diction in “Parable in Praise of Violence” elucidates the condemnation of the speaker towards those who lash out due to their emotions through …show more content…
These individuals do not sugar coat their feelings and tubs would do anything to release themselves from their everlasting pain, and thus continuously react violently to ease their feelings. The speaker’s repetitive “thanking” in the poem for every action or idea is sardonic because none of the thanked deeds are particularly good, but hindering. “Rude muscles” and “castrated legs” do not help someone succeed, yet are thanked; while efficiency and all the work put into creating “good machines” are left unthanked. This expounds the skewed nature of society’s priorities-- people only see the bad and do not acknowledge all the amazing things the world has to offer, and in result feel the need to react violently. …show more content…
This is seen when it states, “for the harpoon gun we aim at G-d and death/ and all the unknown world, and for the speak-stuck beast,” (Barnstone 22-23). This quote expounds upon the message that people use violence to come to terms with answers one will never receive. Higher powers, the unknown, and Moby Dick from the novel of the same name, the implied “beast” represent an outside power who one is not able to accept the dominance of. Just as Ahab cannot come to terms with Moby’s superiority over his own, people often cannot tolerate the fact that some things are uncontrollable in life. All of the allusions in “Parable in Praise of Violence” of Leaves of Grass, Moby Dick, and Gulliver’s Travels are all experiences that character’s are vulnerable to their surroundings and are not able to help themselves because having a “triangular hump”, “rude muscle”, and a “castrated leg” (Barnstone 2-4) are disabilities that are not of one’s own making, but a product of nature. Due to these defects, these people lash out in violence. The harpoon gun is the only way that Ahab can kill Moby Dick-- the only time that he can make himself feel powerful by slaying the “omnipotent”. The gun is the way he can avoid the acceptance that he cannot overtake the whale, so instead of realizing the truth, violence becomes an easier option. When the author states, “rope ripping through torn hands, for what refuses to be
¬¬¬Though most American people claim to seek peace, the United States remains entwined with both love and hate for violence. Regardless of background or personal beliefs, the vast majority of Americans enjoy at least one activity that promotes violence whether it be professional fighting or simply playing gory video games. Everything is all well and good until this obsession with violence causes increased frequency of real world crimes. In the article, “Is American Nonviolence Possible” Todd May proposes a less standard, more ethical, fix to the problem at hand. The majority of the arguments brought up make an appeal to the pathos of the reader with a very philosophical overall tone.
I thought angrily. How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith, their anger, their defiance? What does Your grandeur mean, Master of the Universe, in the face of all this cowardice, this decay, and this misery? Why do go on troubling these poor people’s wounded minds, their ailing bodies? … Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. … But look at these men whom You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? The pray before You! They praise Your name! … I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man.” (Wiesel
Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” does a marvelous job of highlighting the violent nature of mankind. The underlying cause of this violent nature can be analyzed from three perspectives, the first being where the occurrence of violence takes place, the second man’s need to be led and the way their leader leads them, and lastly whether violence is truly an innate and inherent characteristic in man.
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is a short story that is about a fifteen year old pretty teenager named Connie, who does not get along with her mother and is irritated by her sister. Her sister can do no wrong in her mother's eyes while she is constantly getting criticized. Connie enjoys listening to music, watching movies, and spends a lot of time going out with her best friend and meeting boys. Until one day, a creepy guy, she had seen out one night shows up in her driveway when her family is out. He introduces himself as Arnold Friend and insists that Connie go for a ride with him and threatens to harm her family if she doesn't. In the story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates portrays Arnold Friend as a rapist; he creates the climax of the story in which Connie is taken from her home and family, by him through violent means.
How is it that in the year 2016 violence is not only increasing but is also being accepted at a startling rate? Most teenagers in modern days believe “that it was acceptable for a boyfriend to act aggressively towards his partner in certain circumstances.” (Statistics). If teenagers today believe that acting aggressively towards your partner is okay, will they grow to believe that other forms of violence are acceptable as well? Will they create a world where domestic violence, rape, and murder are “no big deal”?
A question that arises in almost any medium of art, be it music, film or literature, is whether or not the depiction of violence is merely gratuitous or whether it is a legitimate artistic expression. There can be no doubt that Michael Ondaatje's long poem The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a violent work, but certain factors should be kept in mind before passing it off as an attempt to shock and titillate; certainly, the poem does both of these, but they are not the primary purpose of the work. For one thing, social context needs to be considered; Billy lived in the "Wild West", a time associated with range wars, shoot-outs and great train robberies. The entire legend of Billy the Kid has been built around his criminal activities and notorious reputation; indeed, the more popular this myth becomes, the more people he is accused of having murdered. If anything, it was a cultural fascination with violence that "created" the legend, perhaps even more so than anything the "real" Billy ever did. Michael Ondaatje comments on this phenomenon and actually offers an alternative vision of who Billy the Kid was; perhaps he was not just a blood-thirsty killer but a man who, due to circumstance and human nature, was continually being pushed over the edge. Ondaatje is more concerned with the motivations behind the acts of violence than the acts of violence themselves: "A motive? some reasoning we can give to explain all this violence. Was there a source for all this? yup -" (54). If they shock, it is to shock the readers out of complicity and encourage them to think about the nature of violence and their own capacity for it.
Conflict is constant. It is everywhere. It exists within one’s own mind, different desires fighting for dominance. It exists outside in nature, different animals fighting for the limited resources available, and it exists in human society, in the courts. It can occur subtly, making small changes that do not register consciously, and it can occur directly and violently, the use of pure strength, whether physical, social, economic, or academic, to assert dominance and achieve one’s goals; this is the use of force. Yet, with the use of force, the user of force is destined to be one day felled by it. “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword.”
“‘Instrumental’ violence, however, murder for a purpose, - political power, rape, sadistic pleasure, robbery, or some other base gratification – remains the domain of the male. After all, every male is a potential killer in the form of a warrior – and he only becomes a murderer when he misuses his innate physical and socialized capacity to kill for ignoble, immoral, and impolitic reason. While the male is built and programmed to destroy, the female nests, creates, and nurtures. Or so the story goes”.
“Violence never really deals with the basic evil of the situation. Violence may murder the murderer, but it doesn’t murder murder. Violence may murder the liar, but it doesn’t murder lie; it doesn’t establish truth. Violence may even murder the dishonest man, but it doesn’t murder dishonesty. Violence may go to the point of murdering the hater, but it doesn’t murder hate.
While Flannery O’Connor’s Wiseblood is a story of religion, it is also a story of violence. Self-mutilation, graphic expletives, and emotional violence pepper the novel. When weaving together these two narratives of brutality and belief, a new story emerges, one that explores the relationship between religion’s social power and violence. The social power of Christianity, which can be understood as the ability to exert influence over the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of individuals and society, is widely known and well established. Yet, violence complicates religion. Violence can become a way of demonstrating power that erodes and problematizes church doctrine. Violence undermines the social power of the church by concretizing the intangible
The tendency for men to be brutal to his kind has been surprisingly common throughout the history of humanity. From serfdom to the enslavement of Africans in the West, from indentured servitude involving the exploitation of Asians to racial discrimination and all other examples in between, men have proven their capacity for incredible cruelty to other men. Equally common however, are the efforts of certain individuals, whether from within the ranks of the oppressed or from without, who make it their life’s work to bring some sort of amelioration to the situation of those who suffer. Among these freedom fighters there are two major schools of thought on how liberation for the oppressed may be accomplished; those who propose violence, and those
In the article Threshold of Violence published by The New Yorker Magazine, author Malcolm Gladwell alludes to the cause of school shootings and why they transpire. Gladwell tries to make sense of the epidemic by consulting a study of riots by stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter. Granovetter sought to understand “why people do things that go against who they are or what they think is right, for instance, why typically non-violent, law-abiding people join a riot”(Granovetter). He concluded that people’s likelihood of joining a riot is determined by the number of people already involved. The ones who start a riot don’t need anyone else to model this behavior for them that they have a “threshold” of zero. But others will riot only if someone
If King defines violence as “immoral and destructive means” (King, 400), and Mitchell claims that violence can be used to bring about peace and equality. And King further states that “immoral and destructive means” (King, 400), can only bring about immoral and destructive ends. Then it is possible to infer that peace and equality are immoral and destructive. This is an error brought about through a lack of a definition to the terms violence and non-violence. As with the time King found new terms to differentiate between the types of love, he must find a number of new terms with which we may differentiate between the types of violence. The lack of variety has led to confusion that can possibly be eased through an ability to discriminate meanings. A possible distinction King could make between his violence and Mitchell’s violence is by using the terms brutality and brouhaha. A brouhaha could be what King calls non-violence, and brutality being what King calls violence. Brutality being a physical, forceful and damaging act of cruelty. A brouhaha is an enthusiastic act of abnormal behavior for the purpose of causing discomfort in others. An example of a brouhaha would be what King would call a non-violent protest. An example of brutality would be smashing in the windows of a store that refused to serve someone. To fix the claim “the type of peace King predicts from non-violence is better than one from violence,” Dr. King need only add a disclaimer stating the fact that such a claim is purely conjecture and wrought with bias. These changes could cause the essay to lose some of its power over the public, a group that has to think very little about the information that moves them, but it is personally believed that the changes would make the document more accurate for the people who
To begin, this powerful essay focuses everything on violence and how it is being used by games, movies, and even the most influential people such as the president. The author, Barbara Kingsolver central point is to let readers understand the wrongfulness of the violence being shown and done by humans especially in schools. How can the
From the beginning of time, human nature has lent itself to violence and brutality. You see evidence of this as you read the news, or watch television. You might have been, or will be, the victim of this dark side of human nature. Looking back to the children of Adam and Eve, Cain killed his brother, Abel, marking, as I heard in a theology class, what many theologies claim as “the paradigm for conflict and violence.” Throughout our readings in The Story and It’s Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, we have seen many episodes of violence and brutality, ranging from torment to ritualistic murder. What do these acts represent within each story? In examining “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, and comparing it to “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston, I will illustrate how the acts of violence and brutality that we have read about represent deeper issues within society, specifically male dominance and female oppression.