Wealth

In the life of each American, one of the important points that symbol coming of age is the purchase of the first vehicle. This car becomes the starting points of one’s adulthood, giving one the freedom to move around, pick up friends, and expanding the boundaries of one’s environment. My first car gave me a wealth of experiences, most of them connected with pleasant memories. It was a used Fleetwood Cadillac. Although not the most luxurious car one can dream of because of its age, it was a faithful and nice-looking companion that took me to a lot of interesting places.

The car was of 1992 make, the last year when Cadillac produced Generation IV Fleetwoods. It was a four-door sedan with an FF C-body platform. My model had a 4.5 L HT-4500 V8 engine, not bad for the time and indicating that it was a luxury car. At the time when it was produced, it was a bargain compared to other luxury cars, especially those of the European make. Today, however, it does not seem as good as other models that are newer and more advanced from the technological point of view.

When I got it, however, it was about six years old and still could run for a few more years. I had relatively little problem with repairs, except one time when I ran into an accident through my own folly. Faithful, as I said before, meant to me that I could safely use it for a long time without going too much to the shop, something that frustrates me as it takes up a lot of time.

The look was good, too, and the interior felt comfortable. The car was spacious, and this is what I prefer about automobiles that I drive. A car can be elegant and stylish, but if it is too small and friends are crowded when a bunch of four gets inside, it is too small for my tastes. My Fleetwood Cadillac could pick up a crowd of four or even five friends and roar us off to a party or wherever we wanted to go, and everybody was comfortable and enjoying the ride.

The inside had been renovated just before I bought it, so I did not have to worry about it. It was done in hushed up, beige and white colors, reassuring without being provocative. The gamut also gave the car a feeling of style and elegance and even underscored its luxury format.

This car was with me for three years. It took me to dates, to parties, to school, and later to college. I liked it partly because people liked it – they liked to see me drive by in a good-looking, long vehicle with slightly tinted windows and a shapely form. In a year, I has my Cadillac painted beige, the color that increased the look of elegance. It still looked and felt relatively new, which was why I was reluctant to change it.

Being with one car for several years somehow gave me a sense of stability at a time when my life was experiencing sharp swings that are so naturally associated with young age. In a drastic change of environments as I switched from school to college, the car remained with me as a manifestation of my commitment to an old friend. It also saw me through a series of rapid changes in my love life and a string of meetings and partings. Every day, I felt safe knowing that I would open the garage doors and slip into my old friend, starting off to the challenges of this day.

A year later, my parents decided to make me a present for my birthday, choosing a newer Toyota model for me. I was excited about their decision as I felt that sooner or later I would have to replace my Cadillac, but at the same time the feeling of departure from my long-time companion saddened me quite a bit. I was able to sell it at a good price, but somehow I still miss its feeling of space and comfort that engulfed me the moment I got inside. To me, this car came to mean my high school and student youth, and I can still see it in the pictures we took at that time. A faithful friend and a good comrade, it was with me in an important period of my life, taking me places and broadening the scope of my experience.

In our affluent society, we can be said to have everything: our work is not backbreaking. In fact, working conditions are good, and many of us strive to do good work. Technology has advanced so far that we are living longer and better lives. We have come to address many social ills, such as poverty and social forms of oppression, like racism. But more than ever, we Americans seem more and more unhappy and unsatisfied.

What accounts for the disparity between the relative comfort and affluence of our lives, and the inversely proportional pleasure we take in living our lives?

In his essay “The Progress of Paradox,” Greg Easterbrook argues that a general discontent and alienation in our culture today come to us because our lives are filled with choices (a glut of choices) but have little meaning. Easterbrook seems to adopt a view of human beings as naturally pessimistic (if left to their own devices), and urges Americans to be more optimistic and to return to seeking more transcendent experiences that are currently offered by the cornucopia of sex and violence that passes for American culture.

Easterbrook is a self-avowed Christian, so talk of pursuing transcendence is code for religious faith, but may be forgiven this given the work that he puts into making his arguments through evidence. Just because, as he puts it, millions of Americans can afford to spend a lot of money on vanity induced plastic surgery, such as “the navel touch-up” (Easterbrook, 402) does not mean that this is how our resources should or could best be spent.

We should instead turn out considerable resources and wealth to trying to make a difference in the world of the less advantaged peoples of the world; this might be worth while and more fulfilling than the choices we seem to be making instead. Where Easterbrook interprets the rise of elective plastic surgery as a superficial and meaningless activity, a sign of our devolution into decadence, Naomi Wolf, on the other hand, sees the beauty industry’s practices as full of meaning.

For a woman who considers getting plastic surgery, the question is not a superficial or vacuous one. She writes: “The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance” (Wolf, 489). Beauty is never skin deep; that is, one reason why a woman might want to be beautiful is because her exterior appearance is taken to be a sign of her worth and of her interior personhood. A beautiful woman is thought to be a good woman, one who is disciplined and whose life is in proportion.

This is evidenced in work that is done with women (and increasingly more and more men) who suffer from eating disorders. These individuals report that, for then, their eating disorders are about control, about showing the world that they have great discipline and are inherently good, disciplined, and virtuous in the particularly American protestant work ethic (See Bordo below, whom I read for another class).

Where Easterbrook fails to see underneath the surface of the plastic surgery craze, Naomi wolf shows us that it is behaviors that are the aim, not simply appearance. The gendered analysis is important because we can begin to question why it is women’s preoccupation with image that is taken as the chief example of frivolous vacuity, when surely men’s investment is the pornography industry can be read as a much more morally objectionable practice.

In any case, all of these practices can be taken together and read as signs, as symbols by which culture communicates a code of acceptability to its members. According to popular semiotics professor and cultural critic Jack Solomon: “America is a nation of fantasizers, often preferring the sign to the substance and easily enthralled by a veritable Fantasy Island of commercial illusions” (Solomon, 413). What Solomon describes is an America closer to that imagined by Easterbrook, but minus the normativity.

That is, Solomon sees meaning in every little sign or symbol in culture. Either all is surface play of meaning without depth, or all these signs point to a depth beyond the immediately apparent. According to this viewpoint, the problem of our culture is not that we have lost touch with some transcendent being (read: God), but that we prefer not to be on communion with anything grander than a pair of Ferragamo shoes or a Ferrari car. We love our status symbols and our wealth, and the dazzling display satisfies us, if only for a short while.

We are a nation of dreamers and we will believe in this dream of prosperity for as long as we possibly can. Bibliography Bordo, Susan. (2004) “Reading the slender body. ” Unbearable Weight. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Easterbrook, Greg. (2003) The Progress Paradox. New York: Random House. Solomon, Jack. (1990) The Sign Of Our Times. New York: HarperCollins. Wolf, Naomi. (2002) The Beauty Myth. New York: Harper Perennial.

In the movie Antz, the colony’s government was set up with the Queen as the supreme ruler over the entire colony. All decisions for life in the colony were made by the Queen. All ants were required to work together for the greater good of the colony. Ants were not allowed free thought or to be individuals and make choices for themselves. The Queen’s daughter, Princess Balla, was to take over the Queen’s position and rule the colony simply because she was the Queen’s daughter. She inherited this right. There were three social classes of ants that were determined at birth, Royalty, Soldiers and Workers.

They remained in that class their entire life and are not allowed to mix between the classes or change. Each of the classes entitled ants to different rights and styles of living, with Royalty being the top citizens and workers the bottom citizens. Within each of the classes, all ants were equal and expected to follow the rules of the colony. There was a General appointed by the Queen that ruled over the soldiers. The purpose of the army was to protect the colony.

The Queen ruled the Ant Colony in all of the ways of a Monarchy. The right to rule the Colony is inherited at birth. In this case, the Queen, is the supreme ruler of the Colony. The Queen has all of the wealth of the colony and determines how it is divided among the colony. As in a Monarchy, the Queen will rule the Colony for her entire life and then control will be inherited by her family. The Queen makes all final decisions for the Colony. She also rules with with the idea to “work together for the greater good of the Colony”.

The Colony Government also resembles a Communist government because they were not allowed any free thought or choice. All of the ants carried out life like programmed robots. This was true under both the Queen and General Mandible. However, her goals were for the greater good of the colony as a whole which is more like a Monarchy. General Mandible’s goals were self serving which is like a Dictatorship.

General Mandible lead the soldiers with an iron fist. His leadership style was very much like that of a Dictatorship. A dictatorship does not allow any freedom or individual thought to the people. Many of General Mandible’s traits were the same as Adolph Hitler’s dictatorship way of ruling. General Mandible felt the way to total control was to “cleanse the colony” and make a new “pure colony” according to his ideas of the perfect class of people. Hitler had the same goal. To achieve this they needed complete and total control of everything.

They did not allow anyone to question their directions, not even their second in command. To do so would mean death in a dictatorship. General Mandible stated “do as I say or suffer execution”. Both General Mandible and Hitler had commanders under them that were required to enforce and carry out their orders. They were both planning to use genocide to get rid of the classes of people they felt were inferior to themselves. General Mandible’s dream was for “the strong to rise above the weak and wash away the past for a new day to dawn”.

He wanted to build a colony with none of the “worker filth”. Even though General Mandible told the soldiers it was bad to act as an individual, that is exactly how he behaved. Under General Mandible’s rule there would be no private ownership of property and he would determine how the wealth was to be divided which is another trait of a Dictatorship.

Insectopia is an example of Anarchy because there are no leaders, no rules and no government. Each individual does whatever they want all of the time. The goal is peace and harmony. Although there is the ultimate freedoms with Anarchy, the system can quickly become chaotic due to the lack of any government authority if any one group tries to control another. Z wants to experience all there is to life and not be told what to do and how to do it. He sees Insectopia as the perfect place to live because of the total freedom.

The changes that occurred at the end of the movie with the General being defeated and royalty, soldiers and workers coming together reminded me of the changes that occurred in the USSR with the fall of the controlling government and the beginning of a democracy. The new Colony recognized the good that can come from individual freedoms and choices that are allowed in a democracy.

The Colony came together as one whole and chose their new leaders the way an election happens in a democracy. These leaders would work with the Colony to carry out the wishes of the majority of the Colony with no one class being better than another. The individuals would now be free to make their decisions of daily living based on what they wanted. There were still some basic rules that would need to be in place to assure no one group got too powerful and tried to take over control. This is how democracy works in the USA with the people electing their leaders based on the majority wishes for a representative democracy.