Graduate Essays

No, I'm not talking about shiny-haired Hispanic guys, wearing flannels beneath caps and gowns, thumping oom-pah mariachi music in their low-riders, rapping a valedictory speech from a p.a. microphone, while bouncing their hydraulic suspensions onto the football field.

I'm talking about something much more boring than that. This year I decided that I was going to throw my last two years of English Education graduate study into the trash, and begin fresh in a new graduate program at the same college I already attend. Great move! Anyway, all I had to do to apply was send in a letter stating why I was making the switch, and also include two two-page essays that were particular to my area of study. Since it's a month and a half later, halfway through summer, and I still don't have official word that I've been accepted to this program, allow me to share one of my essays with all of you. I thought it would give everyone, including myself, a clearer idea of what my intentions are with this blog.

Question One: What question, theme, problem or issue do you wish to explore? How have you come to have this interest? What has shaped your curiosity? How do you see using the breadth and freedom of interdisciplinary study to organize your studies and achieve your goals for your master’s degree?

My Answer:

As I grew up an isolated young man in the desert southwest of the United States, there were a number of sacred assumptions I had been taught that gave me pride, hope, and peace of mind. One was that I was living in a country that cared for the well-being of not only its citizens, but human beings as a whole. We, for I was on their side, were defenders of justice, stalwarts of education, and forerunners of technological development. The next of these assumptions was that God was the creator of all things and the ruler of the fates of all men.

Over time, my eyes slowly opened to the realities of politics and the global actions of our government. In the months after September 11, 2001, as George W. Bush stood before me on television and attempted to explain that in order to seek justice against Osama Bin Laden, we must go to war with Iraq, I heard him say that the rest of the world, “was either with us or against us.” The veil that respectfully and naively hid the motives of our politicians, trusting that they were pure and honest, that we were safer for what we did not know, had just been blown open, revealing a tiny man struggling to operate a monstrous machine. There was obviously more invested in Bush’s words than what he was saying. Other agendas were at work, fear was their enforcer, and never again would I blindly watch the actions of our highest-ranking politicians without questioning their motives.

I also spent that time obsessed with the comparative study of religion. Aside from rigorous theology, my curiosity also branched out to include paganism, the ancient mystery schools, conspiracy theories, the metaphysical, shamanism, and all the blundering ways in which human beings sought to find meaning in the otherwise bafflingly random events that made up their lives. So for my part I gave up trying to name my beliefs. I will never belong to a political party, since I believe that each is simply a different head of the same beast, consuming the world’s resources in an attempt to continually enrich the economic and political elite of the world. I will also never belong to a formal religion, since I believe that doing so goes against the pursuit of truth. Belonging to a religion, to me, is like choosing a side in an argument in which all sides are partially right and partially wrong, instead of simply trying to separate right from wrong.

As I studied the historical role of religion and politics in our world, I saw that the same patterns continued to repeat themselves even today. Government is still a way of getting the poorest of our society to work for the wealth of the richest. Religion is still a way of controlling those uneducated poor, promising that if they keep their heads down and work, and don’t make too much trouble, they’ll get pie in the sky when they die.

This has all led me to a worldview that questions the value of our modern way of life. Television is the dominant medium of our American culture. Through it we are shown constant images of an unattainable standard of male and female physical beauty, suggesting that something is wrong with the way we already are. Then we are shown what products we can buy to make us thinner, healthier, prettier, manlier, more feminine, and therefore, after all, happier. Of course, interspersed in between these messages are advertisements for the unhealthiest food and lifestyles available to man. Excess in all things, appears to be the motto. We are lured into fearing that we could be sick or diseased, so that we will buy the newest prescription drugs on the market. Of course Drug A has a side-effect that will require it to be used in conjunction with Drug B which has a side-effect that will require it to be used in conjunction with Drug C, ad infinitum. In short, we are over-stimulated, over-fed, under-nourished, over-medicated, and under-exercised both mentally and physically. We have countless addictions propositioning us at all times, and we’re told all the while that what we’re really being offered is freedom.

Our lifestyles are growing increasingly sedentary, our attention spans continually dwindle, and the power of our individual will dries up into nothing. One of the essential paradoxes of our time is that the success of human technological advancement is directly bringing about the weakening of the human race.

One of the essential paradoxes of all time however, can be simply stated as a matter of perspective. Each of us is a fully-operational, miraculously complex, biological machine. Contained within each of us is all the majesty and scope of the universe. Yet if we were to view our world from the vantage point of the universe, we are little more than insects over-populating a wet stone. Our numbers rise and fall, continuously and predictably, and our outcomes, for all of our worry and struggle, are as inconsequential on this scale as grains of sand blown upon a breeze.

So what does any of this indicate as far as how to live one’s life? What is really important in a life where experience is subjective, meaning is relative, and even history and the social structure itself may be nothing more than man trying to impart value to an otherwise unrelated set of random outcomes?

These are some of the questions I wish to explore in my graduate work. I will research these themes in modern literature, popular culture, and comparative philosophy and religion. The Liberal Studies program will allow me to study these topics through the eyes of a psychologist, a political scientist, a historian, and theologian. As I develop this research into my career in academia, I will partner it with my own fiction writing, exploring and defying the constraints of style, while in content satirizing and illuminating the illusory boundaries of our society.

If you've gotten this far, thanks for your patience. It'll get more interesting, I promise!

NEXT TIME: Our first serial installation of CAPTAIN COINCIDENCE! A man of no FORETHOUGHT, no CODE, and no FEAR!