Finish line

I just filed my sixth paper with more than three hours to spare. It is such a relief to have these assignments behind me. One paper was on Ferguson--basically asking why police never learn from past experience. I don't have a short answer to the question. The most hopeful thing I found was the turnaround in the LAPD, after the Rampart corruption scandal and a 10-year DOJ consent order.

The paper I just finished was on landscape design in eighteenth-century Ireland. It was the era that begat the great estates millions now flock to see at National Trust properties. My papers were better written than that sentence. At least I hope so. I concluded with an observation that the opulent lifestyles of the eighteenth-century Anglo Irish planted the seeds for the wars and famine that consumed Ireland in the nineteenth century.

Have the readings for these classes been better than my law classes? Judge for yourself. This excerpt is from an essay interpreting Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal:
"The purely fictional worth of the new paper money created a crisis of judgment resolved by the novel's capacity to serve "as an ideological regrounding of intrinsic value" in its depiction of "the home and companionate marriage" as instantiations of the "real." Authority over assessing "undifferentiated tokens of epistemological opacity" like currency and books devolved to readers. Book buyers' embrace of "Britishness" as a participatory, democratic identity was figured in the "distinct authorial persona" of the novelist, a synecdoche for a liberal bourgeois self capable of acquiring domestic propriety through the performance of politeness."

The sad thing is, I think the writer is hiding some interesting ideas under all those syllables.
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