Philip K Dick example essay topic

During the course of this semester the world witnessed the hegemonic aggression of the United States. The roots of this war have little to do with this war; yet it is important to turn to the arts as a means of understanding our world. The writers Philip K Dick and Ralph Waldo Emerson provide great lenses through which to view our current geo-political situation. Dick explores social control and media manipulation in his writing while Emerson explores self-reliance and the cult of individuality. Both men speak to today's world. Philip K Dick said, "The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words.

If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words". We witness this in today's world in the way the Bush Administration has utilized words like "freedom", "democracy", and "tyranny" to justify their expansionist agenda in the Iraq and Afghanistan. These words represent concepts that are open to wide interpretation. However, these terms are defined by the Bush Administration and then proliferated through media outlets. Since the media outlets are controlled by American conglomerates it is the Bush vocabulary that is fed to the world. Adam Cohen recently explored Emerson's writing in light of the twentieth century in an op-ed piece for the New York Times.

Cohen argues that Emerson's individualism was transformed into cruel self absorption", and that that is a "good description of much of American life right now". Cohen's point is hard to miss-President Bush has declared war on the poor while pushing tax cuts that would benefit the richest Americans and he declared in the foreign policy arena that "You " re either with us or against us". Emerson would surely understand such a world. Combining the Dick ian view of manipulation and the Emerson view on individualism has a synergistic effect. Bush's America is fueled by a cruel self absorption that can be marketed to the world. Gutting affirmative action is referred to as giving everyone a fair shake, while cutting money to Head Start is referred to as giving block grants to the states, gutting public education is referred to as No Child Left Behind, and running huge deficits "makes sense".

Remember in today's world anyone that disagrees with Bush is considered un-patriotic dare I say, un-American. Finally riding the world of weapons of mass destruction is coded language for Empire. Throughout this Presidency the military industrial complex has grown at a pace not seen since the heights of the cold war. One is reminded of Philip K Dick's musings regarding the Third Reich and America", [I was thinking] about how a war forces you to become more like your enemy. Hitler had once said that the true victory of the Nazis would be to force its enemies, the United States in particular, to become like the Third Reich -- i.e. a totalitarian society -- in order to win. Hitler, then, expected to win even in losing.

As I watched the American military-industrial complex grow after World War Two I kept remembering Hitler's analysis, and I kept thinking how right that son of a bitch was". I was always startled by this comparison but now, under the Bush Administration-I can feel it. Yes, the arts can have a profound impact on how we view the world. Emerson and Dick sculpt the way I view the world. Clearly, how we perceive the world is profoundly influenced not only through lived experiences but artistic interactions as well. Like Yeats wrote in "Among School Children", "How is it possible to distinguish the dancer from the dance?" In the information age such a distinction is impossible.