The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

One of the most significant aspects concerning The Flamethrowers is that it deals with the connection that exists between man and the environment around him. This is especially the case considering the manner through which Reno and Sandro interact with each other as well as with others. Reno is shown to be an adventurous sort of person who pursues what she wants and is extremely daring when it comes to attaining her goals. This is one of the reasons why, despite the dangers involved in it, she ends up racing a Valera motorcycle, and totals. Her pushing herself beyond the normal limit can be considered to be Reno’s way of defying nature to such an extent that she seems to be daring it to bring her life to an end. The crash that she has on the Valera motorcycle is a means of showing that nature is still supreme and that despite all the efforts that human beings make towards defying its laws, they are still relevant and will continue to be so for a long time to come. This incident can also be interpreted as a sign that do not have absolute control over the elements, even those that are very familiar to them as seen when Reno is driven by her impulsive nature to try something that has never been tried before by a woman. While the crash does not do any lasting damage on herself, the risk involved in trying to drive it at such a high speed is still prevalent. A single mistake from her and gravity, which is an aspect of nature, takes over and brings about the risk of Reno losing her life.

Geological realities in this novel are especially prevalent when Sandro and Reno travel to Italy at the latter’s insistence. It is during this period that it becomes possible for the circumstances concerning Sandro and his family to be seen. One of the most fundamental aspects of this trip is that Reno comes to see firsthand the way that the Valera family made its fortune. Through the establishment of rubber plantations in Brazil and the use of labor that is not adequately compensated, in addition to its Fascist leanings, this family was able to ensure that it secured its wealth and interests in Italy (Kushner, 2013). Additionally, when Reno gets involved in a civil rebellion in Italy, as a result of her American egalitarian beliefs, she winds up in trouble, being suspected of having had a part in the kidnapping and murder of a man who she had never met before. The result is that the realities that she finds in Italy are in complete conflict from those that she experiences in her home country and she seems to come to the realization that Italy is not the place for her; ending with her escape to France and later, her return to the United States. It is as a result of these experiences that she decides to leave Sandro and take on a new life without him or his influence on her life.

In The Flamethrowers, Reno and Sandro are individuals who come from very different backgrounds, with Reno coming from an essentially working class background, while Sandro comes from a background of privilege. Despite these differences, these two individuals come together because of their love for art and motorcycles and it is through this connection that Reno gets an opportunity to see how the privileged class lives. Reno brings with her the ideals of her working class background which, despite its not having a lot of power in society, is still one that for the most part promotes its egalitarian values. Thus, she ends up essentially attempting to push Sandro towards overcoming his anger or differences with his family and being able to come to terms with them. However, in doing so, she also brings about a situation where she comes to see the Valera family for who they really are; individuals who, despite their veneer of respectability, have a very dark past. It is through the development of this perspective that she comes to the realization that their world cannot be hers. In this way, despite having been the one who pushed to go to Italy, despite Sandro’s reluctance, the realization that it was not what she bargained for points her towards joining a social uprising for the purpose of ensuring that a level of equality is achieved in Italy. This endeavor, however, nearly ends up ruining her life because as a result of the inequality between the poor and the rich in society, the latter seek to maintain the status quo by any means necessary.

In this novel, the relationship between reality and art is questioned (Lerner, 2015). This is especially the case considering that while art is considered to be a uniting factor for both Reno and Sandro; the reality is that these two individuals come from completely different worlds. Hence, their relationship is not likely to last for long without encountering a level of conflict. The story deals with issues concerning the oppressive way through which individuals are able to achieve their wealth and status at the expense of those people who work for them for little pay. It is as a result of these situations being prevalent that they bring about revolutions whose aim is to ensure that the inequalities that are prevalent in society are brought to an end and a truly egalitarian state is formed. This is a theme that recurs in the work of Rachel Kushner and this can be considered to be a means of showing that she is constantly aware of the growing inequality between the rich and the poor in society. Therefore, Reno is the voice that seeks to show that there are a diverse number of differences in society based on inequality that have to be addressed in order to bring about a situation where there is a level of social harmony. This is exemplified in the way that Reno and Sandro separate, which is a reflection of the gap that exists between, people from wealthy and poor backgrounds.

Qualities of an effective teacher

There are many qualities which make an effective teacher but these qualities are often very difficult to cultivate and it may take even years to master them. Teachers have to go through the best kind of training in order to be effective and they should understand that each and every one of their students is unique with unique capabilities. They should note that not all situations in the classroom can be handled in the same way and that they instead require the teacher’s flexibility. Teachers therefore have to do a self examination of themselves to see whether they have qualities which make them effective in class, strengthen these qualities, and finally, work on developing those qualities which they do not have. In this paper, we shall look at some of the qualities which make an effective teacher and how these qualities may affect the learning process of their students.

An effectual instructor has to be exceptionally well prepared. This ensures that the teacher’s work in preparation for class is done on time and it is done in such a way that students will be able to understand what their teacher is discussing. Furthermore, the teacher will be able to teach his students in an organized manner meaning that they will get more from him than if he had not been well organized. The teacher will be able to anticipate the questions which his students are likely to ask after the discussion, and will be able to answer these questions effectively (Helterbran, 125 – 138). It is therefore a fact that a teacher who is well organized will able to cover more with their students than those who are not.

A teacher has to be in every way supportive of their students. This leads to the development of trust between the teacher and the student meaning that the latter will be more receptive when in class (Rinaldo, 42 – 52). As stated above, every student has unique abilities and it is up to the teacher to encourage the development of their students’ abilities to ensure that there is more diversity in class. In this way, students with different abilities will be able to share their knowledge with each other and this will bring about richer learning environment.

A teacher has to be persistent with his students. There are certain students who require a teacher’s persistence in order to develop an interest in learning (Çakmak, 74). It is therefore important that the teacher maintains their persistence in encouraging such students to take an active interest in their education even though such students may be stubborn. If such students need special help, then the teacher should be patient enough to provide such help where he can and where he cannot, then he should ask a person more suited for the task to do so. A teacher’s persistence ensures that none of their students are left behind the others in class.

In conclusion, it can be said that a class or students cannot do well without having and effective teacher. Such a teacher has to be well organized, supportive and persistent in order to get through to their students. A teacher who does not display the above qualities has to work very hard to develop them; otherwise, he will be failing in his duties towards their students. This will ensure that they produce students who are well equipped to confidently face the fast changing world within which we live today.

Heimat (Homeland)

There are many bonds which tie people to the places which they live, the community in which they were raised, or to the people to who they are related. These bonds are a fundamental part of who the human being is and it is very difficult to destroy that bond because to do so would be almost equal to destroying ones’ humanity. According to Flusser (3), it is often the fear of losing these bonds that keeps human beings in places where they feel most comfortable, even if in such places, they have very little freedom. There are times, however, when people are forced to cut these bonds mostly due to circumstances which are beyond their control and these are instead forced to go with the flow, having to come to terms with their lost ties and attempting to form new ones with their places of adoption. It is often in the midst of an environment that is foreign to them that people tend to have a feeling of nostalgia for their previous lives, which was their comfort zone, and actually regret the cutting of those bonds which tied them to their previous lives. It can be said that severing old ties or bonds is a necessary part of an attempt to gain one’s freedom from cultures which have only a one dimensional view of the world, and learning about other cultures. In this way, people end up being more cosmopolitan and by being cosmopolitan, it encourages them to have a more focused view of the world, free of the prejudices which often make people very narrow minded. The question that one should ask himself is whether they made the right choice in severing their old bonds or whether they should have kept these ties.

One of the most important bonds that human beings have is the bond to family. This is the type of bond that one does not choose to have and is instead born into and it is the closest bond an individual can have. Family is very important thing to the human being and it is the first society that he experiences. Not only is it the first socializing factor in one’s life, but it is also the most influential considering the fact that the parents often raise their children to be responsible and successful people in society and to do this, they instill in them the virtues which are considered desirable by the rest of the society. The bonds which tie one to one’s family are often very strong and even though one does not choose which families they belong to, these bonds are permanent. The only way through which one can break the family bonds is perhaps through the death of all of one’s family, and this is a very rare thing. However, there are times when even the bonds of family can be broken. A good example of this is in Adichie’s Headstrong Historian where Anikwenwa rejects everything concerning his mother once he is converted to Christianity. Not only does the bond which tied him to his mother get broken, but Anikwenwa ends up losing the virtues which his mother had taught him since childhood and instead, he adopts those from another culture. This severance of bonds is permanent, and mother and son do not look eye to eye on matters again until the former’s death (Adiche, 212).

Another bond which is also very hard to break is the bond of origins. A person’s origins are very important to him and many people often display a sense of pride in it. When people immigrate to a new country, for example, they often take with them fond memories of their countries of origin and tend to compare their progress in their new home to that of their old one. Many carry the customs and practices of their old country to their new one and they continue practicing them due to their belief that the culture in which they were born is better than the one they have come to live within. Not only do they continue to practice this culture, but they also have great pride in it. However, there is often a great bitterness among the first generation immigrants to a new culture when their children and grandchildren adopt the culture of their adopted country instead of continuing with the culture of the old country. The younger generation does not often pay much attention to the traditions of their elders and because of this, their bond to their origins is mostly very weak and only a few links tie them to it. As time goes by, only a vague knowledge of their origins remains and eventually, it disappears altogether. This is true of Anikwenwa’s son Nnamdi who was born to a father who had started out practicing the traditional African religion but had later converted to Christianity. Nnamdi completely follows in the footsteps of his father’s later ways and does not put much value in the religion of his ancestors nor does he care about or is not close to his grandmother, Nwamgba (Adiche, 215).

The bonds of marriage and love are some of the most basic and important human ties. It is these bonds which are the sources of all the others because they often lead to the family, which is the basic unit of a society. The bonds of marriage and love are as ancient as the human race itself and they are very important in any society. Strong bonds of marriage ensure that a strong family develops from it and the bonds of love ensure the unity of this family. A strong marriage has to have love; otherwise, it is more likely than not to fall apart due to the distance between the couple in it. A good example of a bond of marriage and love is the marriage between Obierika and Nwamgba. One will notice that despite the fact that he was a fairly wealthy man and that he could have had any woman of his choice, Obierika remained faithfully beside his first and only wife, Nwamgba, despite her history of having miscarriages. His bond of love and marriage to his wife was finally rewarded when they eventually had a son (Adiche, 202). The patience which Obierika showed to his wife despite the pressure from the community and his own wife to take another wife is a display of a true bond of marriage and love. It is the kind of example which can be emulated by married couples today who seem to have very little patience and understanding for each other and instead tend to look towards divorce as a solution to their marital problems.

Religion was for thousands of years a necessary part of man’s existence and it still remains so today. Therefore, the bonds of religion and belief are very important for human beings because it brings them together due to their shared feeling of having a supreme being determining their destiny. However, these bonds can easily be broken due to the influence of new and more appealing religions and beliefs. This can be said to be true of many Africans who chose to abandon their own traditional religions in favor of joining in the various Christian denominations. This not only broke the bonds of religion and belief in African societies, it tore the fabric of these societies up. The normal relationships within families were destroyed due to the fact that some members practiced Christianity while others continued to follow the traditional ways. An example of this was the distant relationship Anikwenwa developed towards his mother after his conversion to Christianity and his adoption of the prejudices which the missionaries showed towards people who followed the old ways (Adiche, 212).

The decision of whether to sever old bonds or not to is entirely personal because for some people it provides them with freedom, while for others, it brings about a sense of loss. It really depends on how the individual feels about these bonds and how they affect his life. For some, it would be great to gain the freedom of movement unrestrained by old bonds because then, they would be able to imbibe in the cultures of other people without getting attached to them. Others prefer to remain within their own zones of comfort, not bothering to experience life outside of it. All these are part of the human nature.

The Lady or the Tiger?

The story of The Lady or the Tiger? clearly illustrates that the human being, despite his actions on the contrary, is still very civilized in his behavior and beliefs, and is the most advanced creature in the world. Like the king of the ancient land and his daughter, the human beings of today tend to enjoy living a life of gambling, and are very capable of great savagery if the occasion calls for it. It is also a very notable human characteristic that they have a great love for violence despite the fact that one is said to be ‘inhuman’ if he were to display any kind of violence towards another human being. Many world leaders today tend to preach peace but they are also the first, when they feel that their personal or country’s economic interests are threatened, to declare war on weaker nations which are often powerless to defend themselves. This just serves to show the human capacity to settle conflicts in such an orderly way that wars are no longer made out of the whims of human leaders, as would happen in primitive societies, but for very specific strategic reasons.

Human beings have a tendency of doing everything in their power to first secure their personal interests before they secure those of the communities within which they live. For example, it is very rare for any human being to take in a homeless child who has no food and lives out in the cold despite the fact they have more in their homes than they actually need. The claim that human beings are communal creatures is greatly exaggerated because even within the communities in which they live, they often compete with each other either to have more wealth or to have power over each other. This clearly shows that although the human being has moved away from the jungles and that he has build great cities for himself and created what can be considered to be advanced technology, for many, the law of the jungle still applies in their minds.

The civilized nature of the human being is also revealed through his jealousy of the success of his fellows and it is normal for such to do everything in their power to ensure the downfall of those who seem to be more successful than them. A good example of this is in the story of The Lady or the Tiger? where the kings daughter has the option of saving her lover or allowing him to get married to a maid who she suspects to have been a rival for the attentions of her lover. It is more likely than not that since she would lose her lover anyway even if she saved him from the tiger, she would choose to direct him to its cage. As a consequence, even if she lost him, she would not be able to see the satisfaction on her rival’s face when she claimed her lover as her husband. One would say that the human being has become more civilized than primitive because of our belief that if we cannot have something, then neither can our rivals, and to this end, the human beings endeavors to destroy it. It is therefore true to say that although there are claims that human beings today are still primitive, they are actually not the same primitive creatures that lived thousands of years ago.

Imagination is more important than knowledge

Every man made thing in the world and the knowledge of how to make such things has its origins in the imagination. The first step towards anything that can be created and the knowledge gained from it is by imagining it and then taking the necessary steps towards creating it. Imagination can be said to be the thing which has pushed the human being from the level of an animal to the advanced being that he is today. Without imagination, human beings would not have had the necessary sophistication to allow them to form societies which eventually developed into states and civilizations. The uniqueness of man is based on his ability to imagine the impossible and being able to make it possible through trial and error until he gets it right. Knowledge is a product of the human imagination because it is through the process of trial an error to make what he has imagined a reality that the human being gains knowledge (Steigerwald, J, 924). With this in mind, we shall now look at the reasons why it has been stated that imagination is more important than knowledge. We shall discuss the various aspects that make up imagination and those that make up knowledge and from these; we shall endeavor to determine our conclusion that imagination is more important than knowledge.

In the field of invention, it has been stated that in order for one to invent something, he has to imagine it first. This is especially true of the Wright brothers who even before they invented the very first flying machine, they imagined man having the means to fly. As their designs failed one after the other, their imaginations enabled them to continue to make modifications to their craft until eventually they created their first successful flying machine (Avery, M, 2212). Without their imaginations, they most likely would not have invented the flying machine which until then many had thought was impossible. This invention of the Wright brothers came to change the entire course of human history because others adapted their knowledge of making their flying machine for the creation of even more advanced aircraft. The knowledge of the Wright brothers was used only a few years later during the First World War when aircraft were used to drop bombs on enemy targets. Furthermore, in the second half of the twentieth century, the knowledge that the Wright brothers had used for the creation of their aircraft was further enhanced and used for the development of rockets. These not only enabled man to leave this planet for the first time, but it also enabled him to walk on the moon, a feat which many had only dreamed of and thought was impossible. It is therefore a fact that if the Wright brothers had not dreamed of and imagined themselves flying, then they would not have turned their imaginations into reality. In the process, today, we would still have been very far behind in the technological advancements and achievements which resulted from their invention. The knowledge that came from their imagination is what has turned the world, once considered to be so far apart, to be what is commonly termed as a global village with access to anywhere in the world being only a matter of minutes or hours away. One would therefore say that knowledge is a product of the imagination and because of this, the imagination is more important than knowledge and should be greatly encouraged in society as well as in major organizations (Weick, K, 446).

A government cannot be able to respond to the needs of its people if it lacks the personnel with the imagination to view and predict the changing needs of the society over which it governs (Gogan, J, 453). The development of such a society would cease to continue because its government would not be able to contemplate (imagine) the solutions which are necessary for the society’s problems. Solutions have to be imagined even if there is a wide range of knowledge about a problem because even though one could be knowledgeable about such a problem, one would still be incapable of imagining a solution for it. A good example of this is finding a solution for the drought which tends to occur in the Horn of Africa almost annually. This is an environmental problem which can only be managed if new ideas to alleviate it are introduced in the region and the governments are willing to enforce such ideas, because despite all the knowledge about the drought that has been gathered, very little has been done to deal with it. In order for solutions for such problems to work, governmental officials have to imagine the consequences so that the solutions they put in place can be sustained.

It has been the dream of many people throughout the history of the twentieth century for all the nations of the world to cooperate for the good of mankind. This imagination took the first step into reality with the formation of the League of Nations immediately after the First World War whose purpose was to prevent another war such as that one from ever taking place again. When the League of Nations failed to stop the Second World War from happening, the knowledge which had been gained by the victors of this war concerning its failures was put into good use and its successor, the United Nations was formed. The United Nations has largely succeeded where its predecessor failed due to the knowledge gained from the latter’s failure and its managing to avoid them. From the imagination of nations cooperating, the United Nations has become a reality and its role as an enforcer of peace agreements has ensured that combatants are discouraged from aggressiveness and that human rights are upheld almost everywhere in the world.

In the very competitive business and market environments of today, it has been found that imagination is a key factor in the promotion brands all over the world. Only the most imaginative of advertisements can catch the eye of a consumer and make him want to buy a particular brand of a product. It is common knowledge that most of the components of products are basically the same but it is how these products are branded that encourages a consumer to by only one brand and completely leaves the others. It has been found that the most imaginative type of branding has promotes high sales of a product and it is because of this that advertising agencies work very hard to ensure that they produce only the best. Without imagination, there would be very little competition in the market and as a consequence, manufacturing companies would not strive to improve the quality of their products to increase their sales.

In conclusion, it can be said that imagination has shaped shape our world as it is today. Without it, the human beings would still be at the same level as other animals and not at the top of the food chain as they are today. Knowledge comes about as a result of imagination and in fact, it can be referred to as dead imagination because once it is acquired, there is often very little room for its further development. Imagination is continuously developing and this development is limitless as opposed to knowledge which tends to be stagnant. Knowledge which is said to be true today may not necessarily be so a century from now. Imagination, on the other hand is always developing and new ideas and concepts come into reality every day. It is the means through which further human development can be achieved so long as it is encouraged in all sectors of the society.