“Here today are tens of relativity, opened and a tall the understandable satisfaction of those isn’t just the door behind him their hopes fulfilled. But my thoughts who would be watching at home, to an older been able to from his pocket the flag goes by and the woman who will tell time by desk. The tall birds I don’t mean this to be sentimental. I mean humans 100 to slip through. We are all part of a continuum, inescapably.”
Anna Truong
I know that we touched on this a little bit during our discussion after Gojira on Thursday but I wanted to elaborate on Gojira as an anti-American work. I wouldn’t say that Gojira is anti-American but rather anti-nuclear. It’s true that the US dropped the nuclear bomb and it caused Japan a great deal of turmoil given that the radiation effects persisted several years after the bomb was dropped. But Japan would have gone through that regardless of whether the US dropped it or any other world power. It was only a coincidence that the US happened to be the one to drop the bomb. Gojira seems to be a major symbol for nuclear weapons in the film. It comes to destroy Tokyo much like a nuclear bomb would as Gojira emits an atomic breath that melts buildings, causes fires and destroys the city landscape. The oxygen destroyer becomes a new nuclear bomb considering the potential for mass destruction in the world’s oceans if other countries had access to it. Most of the film focuses on how the Japanese attempt to defeat Gojira. I think the film tries to portray the negative effects of the nuclear bomb in a way that allows its viewers to feel a little bit of what the Japanese felt after the bomb. It could be read as anti-American – because the Americans were the ones who dropped the bomb, released the radiation and thus allowed Gojira to become as strong as it did – but I think there’s a lot more to the film than that.
–Julia Ng
Medical advances were abundant during the 20th century, with major breakthroughs in technology, chemistry, biology, and pharmacology that overlapped to eradicate many diseases. Over the course of the 20th century, drugs to treat illness such as aspirin, the arsenic-based compound Salvarsin to treat syphilis, antibioitcs such as penicillin, steroid hormones such as cortisone were discovered and found to be effective in treating a multitude of fatal and nonfatal illnesses. In addition, the first antiviral vaccines were discovered, including smallpox and polio. These advances lead to drastic improvement in collective health and life expectancy, and fatal diseases like pneumonia and tuberculosis that lead to roughly one-third of all deaths in 1900 are rare in the US now. While some drugs had basis in natural techniques that had been around for centuries, the 20th century also saw the rise of synthesizing new, unnatural drugs often by the process of computer-aided design (CAD).
In response to the multitude of drugs being tested and put unto place came regulation of drugs by government agencies. Over time, drug laws and regulatory agencies have expanded, sometimes in response to health crises caused by the release of a drug. Drugs are now analyzed in their performance in clinical trials, in terms of their risk-to-benefit ratios, mutagenicity, teratogenicity (cancer-causing) and other factors. The climate of medical change accompanied by major advances in science and technology had large implications on culture and society.
– Lauren Hodgson
Sources:
http://www.planetseed.com/relatedarticle/20th-century-and-drugs-treat-sicknesses
http://www.pharmsci.uci.edu/history.php
http://www.britannica.com/topic/pharmaceutical-industry/Drug-discovery-and-development
When we discussed “The Battler” by Ernest Hemingway in class, we mentioned how it seemed to be a coming-of-age story. Many of us were reminded of stories such as Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye. This connection is pretty obvious –these stories all feature a young boy lost in a big world, who learns some sort of lesson about life or adulthood by the end of the story. However, we discovered in class that it’s a bit more difficult to classify “The Battler” as a true coming-of-age story. For one, it’s a short story, so it gives us less to work with and decipher than those classic novels do. However, the main issue is the ambiguity of the ending –we are not sure if Nick has learned anything at all from the encounter, especially not something important enough to be associated with his “coming of age”. We discussed this ambiguity in class, but we didn’t ask the question that interests me now: why? If Hemingway intended for this story to be a coming-of-age story, why make it so difficult to understand the message? The previously mentioned coming-of-age books, Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye, have clear messages that they establish through the “journey” of their main characters. It is fairly obvious in both (particularly Huck Finn) in which ways the main characters come of age and what they learn, and it’s completely clear that they do come of age in some way. “The Battler”, again, is a different story –nothing is clear. Perhaps Hemingway does this as a reflection of his realistic views on growing up. These coming-of-age stories, though often inspiring, can be seen as unrealistic in the “real world”, as many things in life do not contribute to some sort of life lesson and are just arbitrary and meaningless.
-Audrey Doidge
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