I failed to find any satire in this little clip we were given to watch, I didn’t understand the humor.  He talks about reinstituting the draft so that we have more soldiers on the front lines and more protesters in the streets.  He then moves onto how the current Iraq war is very similar to the Vietnam war, he says that both wars proved John Kerry is a coward.  He then says that if the draft is reinstated then the youth will do something so drastic and something so against the antiwar movement.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find the satire at all and I am also having much trouble in finding it in Huck Finn. 

It was interesting to learn more about the war, I was very surprised and shocked to learn that gas companies charge America, their own country, $25 per gallon.  Not only are they charging so much to their own country, but our vice president is a major stock holder in that company so he is becoming very rich of the demise of the country.  The government has to pay the amount because we need the oil for the war to keep our troops mobile, its essential resource.  I believe we are obligated to stay in Iraq because although deaths are occuring if we leave now all those lives would have been a waste.  The soldiers in Iraq right now are holding their government together and if they were to leave the country then everything would fall apart and the whole war would be a huge waste of time, money, and effort.

I went to cnn.com and luckily right on the homepage I found this article on racism

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/12/12/racism.poll/index.html

Today, how serious of an issue is racial bias in this country? Would you say the problem is very serious, somewhat serious, not too serious or not serious at all?

This article was very interesting to read and learn about but it was also very disturbing to know how blacks and whites think so differently about one subject.  Although racism should be out of our society for good, it clearly hasn’t left.  It seems as if nothing has really changed except that racism is more hiddin and brought about in society.  A poll was given from December 5th until the 7th by telephone and the people who took the poll were either black or non hispanic white.  They were asked how serious of a problem was racism in todays society.  It was astonishing to see the results because of the differences between the two races and how different they thought of the issue.

poll results —->  http://www.cnn.com/interactive/us/0612/poll.racism/frameset.exclude.html

This is related to Huck Finn because Huck lives in a time where racism is a very normal thing, it wasn’t uncommon in that time to be racist and prejustice to blacks because that’s the way people were thinking in those days.  The book also takes place before the civil war so not only is racism towards blacks normal but it was still in the era of slaves.

The one main aspect of satire is that it speaks the words that most people would dare not say, Carlos Mencia and Dave Chappelle both use satire in there stand up acts and most people find them very funny.  The film Borat was another form of satire that brought up alot of contraversy through out the nation, the movie covered social problems and views of the American people.  Another wonderful example of satire has to be South Park, this show makes fun of everything possible using satire.  It has gained so many fans that the show is praised and laughed at world wide.  The thing about satire is that it shouldn’t be taken too seriously, it pulls out people’s flaws and I think you should just be able to laugh at it because it is very funny.

Its horrible to learn about how the slaves were treated during that time in U.S. history.  Today in class everyone went up to the board and wrote a sentence or two about how they felt toward the topic.  I wrote about how slaves were fed once a month and how they were given clothes once per year.  The slaves weren’t treated well at all, they were just given enough to survive the brutal years of their lives.  Slaves were forced to work and if they didn’t work to their full potential they were punished by getting beaten or whipped, its hard to believe somebody would do such a thing.