Maira Kalman Essay

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Joseph Winker Terry Thuemling ENG 101 11 February 2012 Democracy, Not Growing In America Maira Kalman is an author of children books; she is also an artist and draws pictures into her books. Maira Kalman has done covers for “The New Yorker”. She has written for the “New York Times” and has owned her own business called M&Co. which was very successful. In the blog post “Back to the Land” written November 2009 and published in the “New York Times” on Thanksgiving, Maira Kalman writes about the founding fathers dream of an agrarian democracy in America and how that dream has veered to a non-agrarian quasi-democracy. Kalman travels from a busy city life to a rural organic farm in California to get back to the way farming used to be in America. Kalman writes about this because she wants for people to not become dependent on Agribusiness. She wants people to grow their own food for themselves, and to learn to live independently off farming. She feels as though democracy in the United States was founded on our ability to all take care of ourselves by farming, and being self-sufficient so that no one person or business would have a more weighted vote than another. Not everyone is capable of growing their own food but it is our freedom that should allow said individuals to purchase food from any business or person they choose, not just giant agribusiness. The first thing that you will notice when you read “Back to the Land” is that it is not written in a formal fashion. The hand writing seems to be done by a child which makes you think differently about the text, as if it’s a child asking for change in the future. There are pictures on just about every page and the grammar is informal as well. It is written this way intentionally the pictures have a purpose which is to give the reader a certain impression. By blurring a picture in a city setting it
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