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Peter Herzog
Professor Ward
English 1A
23 March 2010
The Problem
The clock is ticking, in the background of all our lives. Tick, tock, tick it's 1972
and I'm watching Play it again Sam and Woody Allen is admiring a Jackson Pollock painting. He strikes up a conversation with a girl at the museum:
"That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it", Woody Allen inquires?
"Yes it is," the girl replies.
"What does it say to you," Woody asks?
" It restates the negativeness of the universe, the hideous lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity, like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void, with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless bleak straightjacket in a black absurd cosmos." The girl explains.
"What are you doing Saturday night," Woody skillfully dodges?
"Committing suicide," the girl answers.
United States
English: Woody Allen in concert in New York City.
United States"What about Friday night," Woody asks?
The girl leaves without looking or saying a word. Woody moves on.
People these days seem to be on their own little islands. Some complain about being too busy, but if you listen closely, you will hear that people are proud of their busyness. It serves as a badge of toughness, success, and importance. When most people talk about how busy they are, it is simultaneously a complaint and a boast. So what happened to some other classic American traits, such as friendliness, openness, charity, sharing, and neighborliness? Being neighborly used to mean visiting people, now being nice to your neighbor's means not bothering them. If people are considerate, they assume that their neighbors are very busy and so try not to intrude on them. Dropping by is no longer neighborly.
Americans in the twenty-first century devote more technology...