THE HAND OF FATE from Gin and Tacos

[Crabby Appleton]

THE HAND OF FATE

Whether or not my senioritis-stricken students are getting anything out of it I can't be certain, but my seminar on political literature has given me a great opportunity to re-read some of The Classics. This week we're doing The Jungle. Everyone is assigned it at some point and I doubt many people read it. That's a shame.

The reason it's important goes beyond its rather ham-fisted message – Oliver Stone took most of his lessons in subtlety from Upton Sinclair – to accomplish things its author never intended. Sinclair lamented the fact that the message about socialism was largely lost on his audience. Not many people seemed concerned with the workers, whereas most readers were in an uproar about food safety. The author gave all of the characters flaws in order to make them more believable. As a consequence, many readers were more apt to moralize about personal responsibility than to sympathize with the extent to which the characters were brutally and systematically destroyed. Stop me if that sounds familiar.

Post-1980 America is a land in which it is impossible to engage in a discussion about a System with college-aged people without inevitably and almost immediately devolving into mini-soliloquies on Good and Bad choices. Why have so many kids? Why did he start drinking? And they signed a contract without reading the whole thing! Everyone knows not to do that.

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more at:

http://www.ginandtacos.com/2013/10/28/the-hand-of-fate/

[bemildred]

1. Well done.

I've been annoyed since I came of age about how ill prepared I was by my schooling for the world actually before me, and that was when the economy was at its peak and the schools still tried to educate, rather than train. And as you say it can be very expensive learning by doing.

I think a lot of people victim-blame because they fear to be the next, or fear the notion that they could be next.