The first cultural artifact I’m choosing to represent our theme of civil unrest towards the government is the 1977 Pink Floyd album, Animals. Animals was written by the band’s bassist, Roger Waters, after he read the popular fable by George Orwell that depicts political figures in the Soviet Union as animals as a farm. Orwell was against Stalin, so this book acted as a critique of communism society. Waters was inspired by this concept and decided to write his own critique, but of British capitalism and British society. These critiques are still relevant in USA’s capitalism today, some to an even greater extent.

I chose Animals because of the honest and accurate way Waters describes key groups of society. He depicts several groups of people as animals; big business men and owners as dogs, political leaders as pigs, and the people as sheep, and dedicates a song to each of these groups. And in these songs, Water is nothing short of savage in his views of these groups. For instance, in Dogs, Waters’ describes the corporate leader dogs as predators of the week and backstabbers who live a life of fear and sadness up until they get dragged down by the stone and drown in their anxieties and depression and die, alone. These ethics then become the norm of society and people live their lives being told what to do and how to act as a model business person until they share a similar fate and get dragged down by the stone. These capitalist values and still widely present today.

In Pigs (Three Different Ones), Waters compares political leaders to pigs. Each verse is dedicated to a certain archetype of political figure. However, all of these archetypes have the same things in common: they all abuse their power and oppress the people below them while under a façade of being respectable. Politicians putting up a façade to be liked by the people is nothing new, but it’s deceptive all the same. They make promises and get people to trust them with those promises once they achieve power, but once they actually do they throw their promises out the window and follow their own personal agenda, thus breaking the trust of the people. This happens all the time. In the 2016 election, many people agreed with the promises Trump made. He put up a façade to make people believe he was all for Making America Great Again, but as we’re two years into his presidency more and more people are beginning to see that he too is abusing his power for his own personal interests.

In Sheep, Waters compares blind followers to the songs namesake. He describes these people as just living their lives as their told and being ignorant to the danger that surrounds them, (i.e. the Pigs and Dogs). They blindly follow these “leaders” to the slaughterhouse and by the time they notice what’s going on, it’s already too late. This eventually leads to the sheep rebelling and overthrowing the corrupt government, however they don’t know how to use their newfound power either which leads them to become corrupt as well, thus creating a cycle.

 

The second cultural artifact I’m choosing to represent our theme of civil unrest towards the government is the 2008 film The Dark Knight by director Christopher Nolan featuring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger. Aside from the fact that this is my favorite comic book/ super hero movie with arguably the best portrayal of a super-villain (Heath Ledger’s Joker), I chose this movie because of the social commentary behind all of the crime-fighting and punches.

[What I have written down might not make too much sense or some connected to the theme, but I’m still trying to figure out how to develop this analysis into something more cohesive, so bear with me]

The Dark Knight depicts a force of good, (i.e. Batman and the police), going to desperate lengths to stop a force of evil, i.e. the Joker. The Joker is an embodiment of terrorism, disrupting the way society functions for the sake of watching the world burn. Batman, on the other hand, acts as a symbol of hope against crime for the people of Gotham, more so than he actual law enforcement, even though he is a vigilante. The people of Gotham trust Batman to do what’s right, and Batman pushes the boundaries of “what’s right” in his pursuit to defeat the Joker. He constantly undermines the police, (being a vigilante and all), and even threatens the lives of some law enforcement. He repeatedly uses force on SWAT and law enforcement so they don’t get in the way of his agenda, which is arguably wrong. He essentially kills some of the dogs that attack him, which doesn’t sound bad but goes against his own values of no killing. Batman even, unbeknownst to everyone, secretly using all of the cities cell phones as sonar devices to see everything everywhere as a tool to stop the Joker. This is very similar to the Patriot Act signed post-9/11. The United States were fresh off an attack from a group of terrorists they didn’t fully understand and used this as an opportunity to invade our privacy “for the greater good”, legally. The government gained the ability to go through anybody’s phones, emails, etc. who they deem “suspicious” as being a terrorist, which is very broad. We the people can only trust the government sticks to their word, i.e. “what’s right”, and don’t abuse this power when they’re fully capable of doing so.

The police don’t know or understand their enemy, the Joker. They don’t have anything on him, from prints to I.D. to where his clothing was made, even when he’s sitting across from them in a cell. He tricks the law enforcement by dressing hostages as insurgents and the actual bad guys as the hostages. This leads to innocent people getting attacked by law enforcement. These repercussions of not understanding who your enemy is was and still is a problem we face today in the war on terrorist groups such as al-Queda and ISIS. We don’t know enough about our enemy and where they are, which leads to drone strikes and bombings in places where insurgents aren’t resulting in many civilian deaths. And when news of events like these ones reach the public, people start protesting. There have been hundreds of protests in response to the loss of many unnecessary lives in the conflicts we’ve entered in the Middle East. People don’t like the idea of innocent people losing their homes or dying in a conflict they had nothing to do with, as well as American soldiers risking their lives for no good reasons. All in all, my point is The Dark Knight depicts the grueling lengths people with power go in order to fight for their idea of what’s right, even when innocent lives are put at risk.