Author Archives: ak159008

“You’re the one that’s square.”

by ak159008

“Hey I’m not square. You’re the one that’s square. You’re full of shit, man. What are you talkin’ about? You walk out with those fuckin’ creeps and lowlifes and degenerates out on the street and you sell your, sell your little pussy for nothin’ man. For some lowlife pimp – stands in a hall. I’m, I’m square? You’re the one that’s square, man. I don’t go screw and fuck with a bunch of killers and junkies the way you do. You call that bein’ hip? What world are you from?”

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In a scene in the movie, Travis attempts to save Iris. In doing so he finds himself determining what is right from wrong in her situation accompanied by his age and morality. Iris readily accepts this notion of being cared for when he does step up to rescue her from a “poisonous existence.”

Iris is a merely a child in a society filled with corruption and misery. The life she settles for as a prostitute under the care of pimps, is a life she seems to be content with. It somehow appeared to be as though she found It thrilling to live around men calling her names and abusing her.This life being the closest she might get to a thrilling life away from the conventional suburban one that she left behind in Pittsburgh. New York, to her is where the people who really cared for her lived, she was independent but nonetheless had someone who she thought she could rely on (Sport, her pimp). She tried beyond reach to prove her womanhood. Although while conversing with Travis, her obvious juvenile identity is revealed by her childlike table manners. To her, Travis is a father figure, a person who by means of civility takes up the responsibility to make her a better person in a society as such.    The attempt that Travis makes in saving her, gives him a sense of fulfillment. Saving her makes up  for the lost lust that he could have gained from Betsy .But his heroic act at the end of the movie doesn’t seem relevant anymore because she believed that Sport genuinely cared for her outside being her pimp.

Iris is portrayed as a damaged young girl seeking attention in a corrupt environment, she needs a place in society and therefore settles for the one that comes to her easy.

 

Testimony of Lawson B. Davis:- Klan Terrorism in the South (1872)

by ak159008

“The contents of the oath, as near as I can remember were that female, friends, widows and orphans were to be objects of our protection and that we were to support the Constitution as it was bequeathed to us by our forefathers; and there was to be opposition to the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments.”

The main purpose of the Ku Klux Klan was to get as many as white people as possible on their side in plain opposition to black people gaining rights. They did so by recruiting most fit people on bases of how well organized they already were. Being a social movement it became an advantage to the Klan as they were able to recruit large numbers. As Lawson states in his testimony he thought he was joining a different organization but it happened to be the same as the KKK, this only proves that some recruitments were tricks into getting more people to their side. They believed they were protecting their own race by opposing the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. Black people were therefore deprived of being able to vote for someone to represent them as whole in order to gain rights that seemed fair to them. The motives of the KKK basically put a stop to the main purpose of reconstruction, which was to end slavery and create a new country without conflict between the North and South. The Klan gave people the notion that it was socially as well as politically correct to terrorize humans that weren’t the same color as them and to strip them of their rights. They were against the Union League and the Radical Republicans who sought to help blacks receive the rights they deserved, by threatening them.