Things they carried

So I find this new book very interesting. its like autobiography but it doesn't just tell about things chronology or one event after author. You get into the author's head and see how he views things. Like in the beginning, he is talking to his military buddy about the past and his friend tells him how he wants to be viewed in his book. "Make me out to be a good guy, ok? Brave and handsome, and all that stuff, best platoon leader ever (30). I kinda got something out of this quote. That history takes sides and there can't be an absolute truth. The focus in history might be on one thing instead of the whole picture. People have opinions on historic figures and may write about them in a praise worthy manner or in a negative manner. We can twist a story pretty well. Like in class we were talking about the game telephone. The sentence can be twisted pretty bad. So you can't regard this author's book as history because it may be twisted. YOu can't really trust any history book, therefore. (If you want to take it to the extreme). There s no absolute truth and its totally ok. I personally like seeing people's viewpoints. See how maybe a solider on the Confederate viewed the Civil War or how the Germans' felt about the World Wars. Do we always have to take the side of the good guy? Does the good guy always have to get attention and glory in textbooks and bad guys are viewed as slugs? Its something to look at. I'm totally ok with believing that Columbus was a good guy and just got a little confused when he traveled across the sea. Not that he was a jerk and a crazy man sailing three little wooden things in the ocean.

Postmodernism

ok, so postmodernism has been the central thought for this whole semester with all the books and articles we have read. In my humble opinion I kinda think postmodernism is a selfish way to justify your actions. But I won't get into that. In Cat's Cradle we see that people are unhappy with the present day world. Technology has taken over and is causing more problems than solving. We also see that in 1984, seeing that Winston is not happy with what he is seeing with a controlling government that uses technology to inflict justice. And in Brave New World, we see that productiveness is not always the best. Sometimes it causes the product to lose its quality and uniqueness. The people in the novel were a dime a dozen. No one was really that special and when they met the native they saw someone that was different than all of them and then they were just creepy people watching this unique person...weird. And in Maus, we see that the author was trying to go against the norm and tell a TRUE story about the Holocaust through a comic book. He believed that you wold get a different look into the Holocaust. And he succeeded. Its different from novel because there are pictures, words, and many other things. So postmodernism is looking at the world and being unhappy with it and wanting to do something different. I think thats what its about, doing something different. All those crazy people we learned in the Postmodernism book, were just people doing something totally different for their time. Its also seeing the aftermath of modernism and seeing that it was not the best. that many things and people were lost because of modernism. Technology failed its people and the people need to control the power of it. In that video earlier in the year we saw many stats about the affect technology has on the people. I thought it was pretty crazy. Seeing that a social network on the internet could be the largest country in the world. And Americans are not the #1 country speaking english. It just makes you think. Postmodernism seeks to make the person think about the present world and do something about it.