arrogance= destruction

Money, fame, and style define America. We watch as celebrities flaunt their wealth with their fancy cars, homes, designer fashion and more. Companies make their products more and more advanced, bewitching our society and taking their money. There’s always competition for superiority in our society through materials. Throughout American history, we’ve tried to be the strongest country in all aspects and display the extravagance. Being materialistic, America wanted to use the World Fair as a tool to launch our country into a prosperous nation, making other countries jealous.

     The World Fair introduced America’s new obsession with being the superior nation. Arrogance- an offensive display of superiority or self-importance; overbearing pride; directly relating to the fair. The fair was only constructed and designed in order to show America as a marvelous country, better than the Paris exposition. It was supposed to be designed to be bigger and better than anything that existed no matter the cost or earth limitations. The fair was one hundred percent a display of arrogance in America in the 19^th century. It was used to attract and hypnotize tourists to believe and label America as a world superpower. In order to reach this level of greatness no cost limit was enforced, displaying the arrogance and pride America developed during the World Fair’s construction and exposition. America wanted to reach the title of the number one nation, outdoing Paris’s competition of the Eifel Tower. The act of want, greed, and need for material superiority gained America a title of arrogant that continues to be a title today. It can be said that arrogance was needed to be displayed in order to gain the superiority America wanted to build and construct the beautiful, amazing world exposition. Not only was America as a whole displaying arrogance, but Chicago alone was displaying arrogance. Chicago wanted their own city to be a superior city, outdoing the competition of New York City. The fair needed to be extraordinary in order to capture and amaze tourists and businessmen from all over the world.

          Ill intensions and our corrupted society leave us in a constant state of uneasiness. I believe that when projects are planned and created with arrogance, darkness is bound to be associated with them. With such an amazing achievement of constructing  such an impressive exhibit, there will always be a downfall. There is always someone who takes advantage of other’s accomplishments. For example, Holmes took advantage of Burnham’s accomplishment of the fair as bait to lure in victims. The entire book is written from the perspective of each main character, questioning whether or not the fair differs from darkness. It directly contradicts the white city and the black city, the advancement of the fair’s technology and Holmes’s murdering spree of darkness. In life, not all things can be classified as either good or bad. Most things appear grey, not just black or just white, but a mix of good and evil. Larson’s novel reflects that when evil is associated with a situation, destruction is bound to occur.