Sandy Hook Shooting

http://24.media.tumblr.com/54bd1320940122b1cdd6a309447a7dec/tumblr_mf4mpr0yJF1qdevr8o1_500.jpg

This picture is of Santa Clause making his way through Connecticut and crying when he saw that there would be children at Sandy Hook Elementary who wouldn’t be getting gifts this year.  This cartoon was created after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in the Sandy Hook village of Newport, Connecticut.  The author of this cartoon is known for creating caricatures, mostly of children.  The event hit him especially hard because he loves children and capturing their happiness through art.  The purpose was to redirect attention from gun control and from Adam Lanza towards the losses of the families in Sandy Hook.  The audience was anyone who has heard of the shooting and is thinking about the families who have lost children, nieces, nephews, siblings, and grandchildren.  I think it’s also for the people who are trying to take this tragedy and manipulate it to be about gun control laws or about who saw warning signs in Adam Lanza.  Instead of trying to push an agenda people might, for once, consider the emotional loss people are going through and the sadness they will deal with taking gifts back to the store for their dead children.  A tool the author used to be successful in achieving his message was the allusion to Santa Claus.  Santa is supposed to represent happiness and the kind of hope and belief only children can have so by showing him crying with the gifts scattered by the sleigh they show how innocence died with the twenty children in that Elementary school. 

Scratch and Dent Dreams

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfTa4B7wQ_8

This poem, “Scratch and Dent Dreams,” was written and performed by Eric Darby and won the 2005 Slam Poetry semi-finals.  It is about dreams that we all give up on and what you can do with them when you pick them back up again.  It takes place in a store that sells dreams, hope, and second chances.  Eric Darby is a nationally recognized poet who has competed in and won several poetry competitions.  His works have been included in four spoken word anthologies, and he’s had two albums released by Poetry Jam and Rounder Records.  Currently, he attends Syracuse where is a creative writing fellow.  He wrote this poem to inspire hope in people that give up on their dreams and to lead them to give that same hope to others.  The intended audience was dreamers and those who think of themselves as failures.  Also, the poem was directed towards people who love slam poetry and other works belonging to Eric Darby.  This poem overflows with examples of pathos, comparisons, and hidden meanings.  For example, the title of the poem is scratch and dent dreams.  Something that is “scratch and dent” in a store means that when you take it up to the register you get money off for its imperfections; a small tear or maybe a scratch on the side.  This comparison of imperfect dreams to other “ruined” merchandise was very effective in getting Darby’s message across because it reminded those who have given up or are struggling that just because their dream isn’t as perfect as they’d like, that doesn’t mean it has to be over.  An example of pathos is when Eric said, “You won't have any directions or factory number tabs but don’t panic, there’s a hundred ways to do it right and none to do it wrong.”  The emotions used here are hope and perseverance.  I found this line very effective because often, people give up once things get difficult and he doesn’t want them to do that.  He is basically saying that you can’t mess up your dreams as long as you keep going.

A Question

“A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.”
- Robert Frost (A Question)

The poem “A Question” by Robert Frost follows a theme common in many of his poems: the simple pleasures and meaning of life.  In it, a voice addresses mankind and asks about life and suffering.  Robert Frost is a famous writer, possibly the greatest American poet of all time.  His style was and is marked by an incredibly mastery of realism and description of rural life.  Unlike some artistic geniuses such as Van Gogh, Frost was greatly appreciated and revered during his time.  And, unlike many artists today, Frost held his more ardent fans in contempt because he felt he should be respected for his work, not worshiped   The purpose of “A Question” was to raise the point whether or not life is worth the suffering we endure.  It was written in 1942, two years after his son Carol Frost committed suicide.  This was most likely a time when Frost underwent a lot of suffering and questioned why bad things like that happened to good people.  The intended audiences were people who question whether or not life is worth it (like Carol Frost) or has any meaning and the people who regularly followed Frost and awaited his new works.  One rhetorical device used by Frost in this poem was punctuation or, more specifically, the lack of it.  Though the simple verse is clearly a question, there is no question mark at the end.  The effect I received from this choice of non-punctuation was that question was rhetorical.  The asker already knew his answer: no “all the soul-and-body scars were not too much to pay for birth.”  I felt this helped him achieve his purpose because, since the idea was to find out whether life was worthwhile, he found and gave an answer.  Another device Frost utilized was ethos via implied metaphor.  He wrote “A voice said, Look me in the stars.”  The implied metaphor here was that the stars were the eyes of this being.  This aided Frost’s purpose because the look me in the stars line coupled with the phrase “And tell me truly, men of earth” made it clear that whoever or whatever was speaking was greater than man, greater than earth, and was capable of deciding objectively that all the suffering mankind dealt with every day was worth it.

I will Fight you for the Library

Link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qXgPfMGG8E

The poem “I will Fight you for the Library” by Taylor Mali is a series of four letters one of his former teachers sent when his library time was taken by the dean of instruction, Professor Blackstone, for a meeting on appropriate use of school facilities.  The four letters Mali read as part of this slam poem were the responses to letters sent by the administration in answer to the first message.  Mali is known for his style and flair in slam poetry, a text most often used in competition known as poetry slams.  It expresses a person’s story and/or struggles, usually in an intensely emotional style.  The poem was written for (and technically by) his fifth and sixth grade English teacher, Dr. Joseph D’Angelo.  The purpose of Mali’s poem was to stress that nothing and no one comes before the student, even the teachers and especially the administration.    Mali often varied his tone by raising his volume on phrases like “That Dr. Blackstone, the dean of instruction, would even consider cancelling one class’s library period in order to hold a meeting called facilities utilization IS SO OBTUSE I AM INCAPABLE OF APPRECIATING THE IRONY IN IT.”  It is in this example and others like it that Mali takes full advantage of reading this poem aloud.  While writing to an authority figure a person does not typically use capslock or make any alterations to the text that would imply disrespect.  However, out loud, he could and did show all the emotions felt by the teacher in the poem.  Another rhetorical device Mali utilized was slang.  In his second letter he addressed it “Dear Dick.”  The excuse of course would be that Dick is a nickname for Richard.  However, in reality Mali was using a slang word for jerk which is dick.  This was effective because it showed that Mali was willing to put his job on the line for his students because their education was more important than his job.  This was shown again through the use of the words “If any one of my classes are denied use of the library next week then please alert Dr. Joyce Santiago, the district superintendent, to be ready to accept my resignation.”  In this letter the teacher used logos because he knew that something his superiors could understand--since the importance of research time was apparently beyond their comprehension--was the trouble of hiring a new teacher.  He appealed to their logic and pathos (e.g fear) via an ultimatum to get what he wanted, which was library time when his students needed it.

I Hate e-readers

Link:  http://thecompleteworksofwilliamshakespeare.wordpress.com/tag/i-hate-e-readers/?blogsub=confirming#subscribe-blog

The blog post “I Hate e-readers” is a satirical comparison of e-readers to “real” books. The piece uses heavy sarcasm, profanity, and some other offensive language.  The author does not include their name in their “About” but I will refer to him from this point on as Will because of the name of his blog (The Completely Works of William Shakespeare).  He appears to be very cynical and, based on the other posts he’s made, is not shy about approaching controversial topics such as terrorism in the Middle East and racist jokes.  I assume he is male because of the comment he has posted at the top of the post (I won’t repeat it).  I consider him qualified to write on this topic because it is merely about personal preference and you would be hard-pressed to find someone not qualified to have an opinion. The purpose is to discuss why the e-reader—specifically the Kindle—is inferior to the written word.  Will wrote this piece in the context of a society being revolutionized by e-readers.  As people continue to buy newer and newer Kindles and Nooks he feels that is important to remind people that books are infinitely superior.  His intended audience was people who both like and hate the e-readers.  I think it appealed more to those who don’t like the e-reader because it denounces them.  It could also, however, be interpreted as a text meant for people who do like the e-reader in an attempt to sway them towards having a new opinion.  The two tools used the most in this text are humor and ethos.  As a sub-category, diction helps to establish humor and pathos (this case he appealed to humor).  Several times throughout this post he utilizes humor with language like “the day my world shatters because I can’t consult my National Geographic Illustrated Atlas Of Space on the cross-town bus, I’ve officially got bigger problems” and “The Kindle boasts a screen that ‘reads like real paper without glare, even in bright sunlight’. Y’know what else reads like real paper? Paper.”   Humor did help him achieve his purpose because it takes the edge off of what sometimes errs to very aggressive language.  An example of where he used ethos was by listing the value of books and the Kindle and defending both sides.  This aided Will because, instead of making up petty reasons for while the Kindle is bad, he effectively took the arguments the opposing side would have and refuted them.  Another example of ethos is the title of his blog “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.”  Unless Will was being pretentious, this establishes him as someone who not only likes to read but someone who reads text of considerable value. 

Why it's Time for Jews to get Over the Holocaust

Source:  http://thebeaconmag.com/2012/02/opinions/why-its-time-for-jews-to-get-over-the-holocaust/

The article was surprisingly well-written for such an ignorant title.  In it, author Binyamin Weinreich explains why Jews need to “get over” the Holocaust.  He believes that the Holocaust needs to become a part of cultural memory and history that we can learn from instead of an ugly wound that we continue to poke.  He also discusses how the Holocaust has taken over Jewish culture and how he hopes in the future it can be viewed as a part of Judaism, not its defining point.  The main point of the article was not to anger people but to say that by trying to preserve the Holocaust as if it just happened we are lessening the importance of what occurred and will, therefore, never learn from it.  Binyamin Weinreich is an author for the Beacon Magazine.  He attends Yeshiva University, a private Jewish college located in both New York and Israel.  I believe his intended audience is people in general but more specifically the Jewish community.  They are the ones he wants to “get over” the Holocaust.  However, he also addresses all of mankind in his request to not glorify the Holocaust but merely remember it.  This article was written in 2012, seventy years after the horrible events of the Holocaust, by a man who lives in a situation completely removed from that of Holocaust victims and survivors.  I think that for most people Weinreich did not achieve his purpose because he was very sloppy with his diction.  This can be seen in his choice of title, “Why it’s Time for Jews to get Over the Holocaust.”  He was trying to be clever and instead came off as insensitive and slightly anti-Semitic.  Pathos worked against him here because I, personally, was set on edge for the rest of the article, waiting for him to start praising Hitler or denying the Holocaust altogether.  Another example of where diction did not work out in Weinreich’s favor was when he wrote “get over.”  He meant get over as in accepting the past for what it is and trying to move forward.  Because of his poor word choice it instead sounded like he meant Jewish people needed to get over themselves because the Holocaust wasn’t a big deal.  I understood the points that he was trying to make, not to dwell in the past forever, but he made some unwise choices in relation to wording and offended a lot of people because of it.

The Olympics has Destroyed Womanhood

The source for this article was thethinkinghousewife, a random house wife’s (Laura Wood) blog.  If this wasn't a topic about women and opinions I don’t believe that she would be especially qualified to speak about any current events as much as a journalist would be.  The name of Wood’s blog grabbed my attention immediately because it seemed to me like she would be the kind of woman who ran her home but was still in your face about feminism. I thought that because the title of her blog was the thinking housewife as if housewives were normally not thinking.  Instead, I found that she adhered to the idea of women as homemakers with curves and a cookbook at hand.  The purpose of this article was to address the piece written by Yuksel Aytug, the Turkish journalist who said that the Olympics were destroying womanhood.  Wood felt that it was necessary to show some support for Aytug in the midst of a storm of angry responses to his article.  In the fallout of what most perceived to be an incredibly misogynistic statement Wood praised Aytug for finally saying what everyone was thinking back at home.  The intended audience was for people who agreed with Aytug that female Olympic athletes were ruining feminism or who she felt needed to be swayed into believing that Aytug was not, in fact, a misogynist.  I’m not exactly sure how well Wood achieved her purpose because she seemed to be winning and losing with each word she typed.  On one hand she established ethos really well, backing herself up with the opinions of other people who agreed and had pictures ready to show of androgynous women from the Olympics.  On the other hand, some of her language was far too strong and I found it off-putting. For example, when she said, “The Olympic Games are anti-woman. They require female athletes to ape men in grotesque ways. They compromise female fertility and modesty. They promote the idea that aggression and competitiveness in women are normal and healthy. They debase not just women athletes but womanhood throughout the world.”  To me it seemed like she made a huge claim that she doesn’t have any solid evidence to back it up and a sweeping generalization.  The claim she made was that the Olympics are anti-women.  That’s a pretty ridiculous thing to say, in my opinion, considering that if they were that anti-women then women wouldn’t be allowed to compete in them.  Women, unlike in a lot of other fields, are not treated much differently than the men in this competition and are given just as much praise for their achievements. The generalization she used was that that the Olympics “debase not just women athletes but womanhood throughout the world.”  Just to be sure I was getting the meaning correct I looked up the word debase which was defined as lowering the quality of something.  The Olympics literally put women on a pedestal and give them gold for being the very best at something around the world.  In what way does that debase them?  By using diction with negative connotations like grotesque and debase Wood, in my opinion, achieved the opposite of what she was hoping by making me offended instead of agree with her.