On page 247 of ‘ Super Sad True Love Story’, the author described Lenny’s and Eunice’s running back to Manhattan at the special time of political upheaval.  When they needed to get on the ferry, Eunice told Lenny that she could go to find her sister and David alone but Lenny thought that Eunice’s credit was too low to be distinguished from the LNWI protestors that she would easily be killed by mistakes.

   What a horrible and dystopic world! In my picture above, the bad credit card and good credit card are pointing to different life directions; this book corresponds to this picture very well that bad credits point to death and good credits point to life. In the world Lenny lived, people were no longer fresh bodies but digitalized credit numbers. When people were interacting, it would not be one’s integrity or characteristics that can make people like him but his credits. Humans were put in rankings just by credits; there is no human equity deep down people’s thoughts. When one’s number is lower than one certain value,  he would be no longer deemed as valuable and worthy to be saved. Worst of all, this pathetic phenomenon could be a vicious cycle that if people only appreciate high credits, then people who have credits could be put in higher positions and had priority in using social resources, which can result in generations of high credits. Gradually, the social wealth would be controlled by small amounts of social elites, causing opportunities to climb up social ladder to be infinitely small. What would happen then? Turmoil. Killing. War.

     Thus, I believe that as the biggest threat of world relying on highly developed technology, digitalization is also the most dystopic point in this book.

When I was looking over the contents in the Pandora Box, I was immediately drawn to a paper with two lists: countries which have already abolished death penalty and which have not. The countries which have already abolished the death penalty are printed black and the countries which have not are printed red, as if printed by blood. By this strong contrast of color, the author clearly wants us to think upon this grave and serious topic: Should the death penalty be abolished? In addition, with the names of countries in black bigger than those of countries in red, the quote of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: ’If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed.’ and an archaic and horrifying electric chair on the background, the author implicitly endorses the abolition of death penalty but still hopes to arouse readers’ rational and incisive thinking.

This paper reminded me of an old Chinese saying: Render injury with kindness, then with what to recompense kindness? To be honest, I remain neutral on this topic. As far as I am concerned, death penalty is the real respect for human beings because if punishment for killing is not far more severe than that for theft or smuggling, how can we differentiate human life from anything else? Thus, I firmly believe that the kindness to malefactors is the cruelty to victims. On the contrary, I also question our society’s power to sentence one person’s death. If the killer can decide the fate of the victim, then how are we different from the killers when we execute one’s final sentence? After all, no one is the god.

Ideally, a country without the death penalty is the symbol of a highly developed and civilized society. Whether the current world can function well without the death penalty still needs more deliberation.

As the protagonist of ‘Super Sad True Love Story’, Lenny is Gary Shteyngart’s guinea pig whose life shows the process of people compromising their citizens’ rights. The insignia on soldiers’ uniforms, a sword superimposed over Lady Liberty’s crown can best describe the invisible power overriding people’s mind and life.

In the book, the United States collapses and the olive-shaped social structure becomes a pyramid-shaped social structure which means an aggravation of discrimination between different classes. However, people refuse to explore and correct this social injustice but instead deride poorer people, forming a vicious cycle. In the book, everyone is exposed to their authority’s surveillance and others’ peeping that even strangers can visualize Lenny’s love for Eunice in real time. Without those internal and private emotions kept to ourselves, people in those books can hardly be regarded as independent individuals. In the book, people prefer playing apparat rather than reading books. They no longer clean their hearts and enrich their brains through reading but accept the rude and inhumane data stream.

Are these scenarios kind of familiar? Yes, they are the soon future our society may become if we continue exchanging our ability to think and criticize for high tech products. Just as the world described by Neil Postman in ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’, “people hypnotize themselves into addiction to TV”. In ‘Super Sad True Love Story’, the only difference is that people are addicted to apparat and FAC which nearly reduce real human contact to zero despite having sex.

Reflecting on our current society, businessmen are acceleratingly accumulating money and deepening the gap between classes; ubiquitous cameras and the Internet’s open information are cornering people to total exposure; an increasing amount of people are satisfied with only reading books’ gists. Most importantly, people are too focused on high tech to notice those crises. Though the situations described by Gary are exaggerated, we still need to carefully deal with technology’s brainwashing power.

The radio introduces a Persistent Surveillance System which uses planes with cameras to video the whole city. There are obvious benefits of this system: In big and populous cities like New York, there are crimes like homicide, rape and assault happening everyday. Compared to traditional police operations, this system can go back in time and locate the criminals in minutes, hugely retrenching the cost of manpower and resources. More importantly, when a crime organization is too big to tackle, this ‘sky eye’ is essential in providing comprehensive details of criminal members’ traces in order to crack the crime cartel at one stroke. Furthermore, as common sense indicates that people would not dare to commit a crime when they know police are watching them, this system can not only trace malefactors, but also deter potential criminals.

However, many people object, on the grounds that as conventional wisdom shows, the system would soon trickle from military use down to ordinary people’s daily life. Because of the cameras,we will actually live under total exposure. With access to this volume of information, this system actually asks us to give an exorbitant level of trust to government which, as history can prove, may bloat to totalitarianism or even worse. In addition, not everybody can stick to moral choices. For instance, J. Edgar Hoover, with unparalleled status and power as the first director of FBI, committed personal assaults, blackmails and even assassinations in the name of protecting people and fighting crimes, the same excuses might given by any government. Now, with government’s loosened policy about surveillance and the abusive actions by special agencies, handing more information and power to government is unimaginable.

In sum, though the benefits of this system are concrete(decreased crime rate) and the weaknesses are conceptual(invisible privacy invasion), we still need more careful consideration.