Welcome...and initial guidelines...

This blog will be used in the spring of 2008 by 80+ students at Drexel University to investigate the effects of Iraq on culture and the reverse. Our goal will be to better understand why the US is in Iraq, and to question whether literature can help us on this journey.

Weekly plans and other materials will always be posted in Vista, not this blog. So go to Bb Vista to get the discussion prompts and other instructions.

I intend this blog to manage our discussions and track our collective investigation.

You should have received an email from me inviting you to become a contributor to this blog. The email was sent Monday afternoon to your official Drexel email address.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Blow vs. Iraq

One of my favorite movies is Blow. This movie is about one man, George Jung, and how he goes from happily smoking and selling marijuana to soon becoming one of the biggest cocaine dealers in America. The movie starts showing him as a young man moving from place to place to get by. He lands himself in California where smoking marijuana is the thing to do. George and his friends soon start getting into dealing to make some money. However, they do not stop at that. They kept selling more and more because they were making an extreme amount of money. George soon learned that he could be making more money with the harder drugs. So, he started getting into selling cocaine. He eventually was just living his life on the run from the FBI because of all the drug dealing he was involved with. George questioned himself and wondered why he let things get as far as they did. He did not have a reason for it except for money. He also was hurting so many people along the way, such as his daughter.
I feel that the war in Iraq has had a similar outcome to that of George Jung. We started this war in confidence and with a reason, but now people are questioning why we are still there. It is as if we have no way out unless we sacrifice things other than the lives of our soldiers and innocent people. George was not willing to sacrifice the money he was making and his addiction in order to care for his daughter and be a true father. We need to realize that we have to get ourselves out of the war because we cannot afford to get deeper and deeper and then truly have no way out.

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