Docu...what?

http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=6XapgAPHMsU&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D6XapgAPHMsU%26feature%3Dyoutu.be

An Aggressive Suggestion

https://drive.google.com/a/cng.edu/file/d/0B0liDXUjLAa8NGtuc3E5Q1k2aWc/edit?usp=sharing

Script: Barbara Rodriguez, Sophia Estrada, Daniela Amitai, Cristina Serrano.
Voice: Cristina Serrano
Edition: Barbara Rodriguez, Sophia Estrada, Daniela Amitai, Cristina Serrano.

Exploring The Lens

Two-Shot

Low-Angle

Close-Up

High-Angle

Over The Shoulde Shot

Wide Angle

Fake Telephoto Lens

Point of View

Red Card

How many rhetorical fouls can a person commit before being shown a red penalty card and forbidden to play the next game? None sadly. Although, if arguing was a soccer game, Bill O’Reilly would be a fair contender to Gerardo Bedoya’s impressive red card accumulation. 

The argument was going well, two different views, a fallacy here and there, but nothing that would interrupt the dynamic, when suddenly the topic changes drastically. O’Reilly changes the tense away from the future and starts talking about Stewart getting fired. This was utterly unnecessary. O’Reilly commits his second foul  when he humiliates Stewart by debasing him with his supposed firing. He does not allow Stewart to make a choice and rather reduces him to petty defense. 

O’Reilly then says “If you really were sincere you would.” When talking about how Stewart should bring a muslim to replace him. This is not only fallacious thinking (reductio ad absurdum), but also innuendo that Stewart is fake and that people should not trust him. This gives us our third rhetorical foul. But O’Reilly doesn’t stop there. O’Reilly then goes to aggressively shout “If you really cared about the muslim community you’d bring in a substitute muslim host! Let’s call it for what it is!” Which is just utterly stupid. Stewart’s gesture of disappointment and perhaps shame, helps to highlight his contender's stupidity.

This goes to show that when a person is desperate, it succumbs to rhetorical fouls. We see this everywhere in life. In spanish we call it  “patadas de ahogado” in soccer we say “Argentina en el cinco a cero.”

The Subtleness in Pettiness

Not five minutes ago I made full use of most of the tools presented in Chapter 12 of Thank You for Arguing. I saw myself unnecessarily getting into an argument with a guy from our grade about senior activities. I did it out of pure thirst for fighting I guess. He stated something like “Why can’t we have the same fun senior activities as other senior classes. It’s not fair that we are not allowed to do the same things other classes were permitted.” The second I read that, I feel a squeamish voice in my head that spotted the fallacy, and because I was feeling like Hemingway in the merry-go-round scene of Midnight in Paris, I made him realize, not without being obnoxiously burlesque, how fallacious his argument was and how little it would do to help. He, of course, used my unnecessary  haughtiness against me and I found myself under attack. He focused his argument on my facetious tone and said I wasn’t being helpful, while completely ignoring my premise which was “We should change our argument.”

First I started by changing his terms. I had already dissed his fallacious thinking and stated that we shouldn't retort with extreme protest.Then I redefined his terms. In one of his responses he had said that we deserve better as a grade because we are one of the best classes CNG has ever had and we have too much potential as a grade to be wasting it. I used his same statement, but redefined it by saying that because we are such a great class we should use our potential with intelligence and not waste it on fallactic thinking. Then I went ahead and applied some rhetorical judo by claiming that his argument was irrelevant. That there is an obnoxious person concerned with grammar and logic is no what is important. What matters is to get things done. Then I started using commonplace words such as “battle”, “losing” and “winning” and defined the issue in the broadest context. I said that we are talking about our senior year, the most important year of our life up to this moment, we should take it seriously and by using bad logic and extreme actions we are only going to harm ourselves. Bla bla bla. I ended my argument by offering choices: we either keep doing what we’ve been up to, or change our tactics and get things done.

I don’t think I won because my ethos plays too much against me. I am still the person who gives a flying … about senior activities. Nevertheless, this was a good exercise and a pleasant realization that I’m applying unconsciously the tools taught in Thank You For Arguing.  

Laugh and Shoot

Practically every single tactic for appealing to pathos given in “Thank You for Arguing” is present in Bill Maher’s documentary “Religulous”. The documentary’s end is especially loaded with the rhetorical conundrums, as it is the most important place for affecting an audience’s judgment by changing their emotions.

Maher uses humor throughout the documentary to calm people down from the extreme ideas he has and is about to present. His jokes also make him appear to stand above any petty squabble in the polemic. In minute 90  Maher says, “There is more than one mosque in the world that used to be a church and before that was a temple, because it is easier to change the sign on the top and say Under New Management than it is to change the whole building. I worked in a lot of comedy clubs in the eighties that still had the disco ball on the ceiling, and in the nineties, they became strip clubs, and now they’re a Starbucks.” The factious joke certainly ridicules the situation, but its purpose is mainly to appease the audience from whatever harsh stuff Maher has said.

The documentary’s last scene, nonetheless, is a feast of rhetorical tactics. Violent images of atrocities caused by the religious accompany Maher’s monologue, where he constantly instigates the audience with fear of “the irrational, the religious”. Maher is close to mimicking what he criticizes when he says, “The irony of religion is that because of its power to diverge man to destructive courses, the world actually could come to an end.” His language also gets progressively simpler as the music becomes more dramatic. The images of 9/11 and other terrorist acts direct the audience’s anger away from him. Maher’s very last monologue shows him in a frontal shot, portraying his anger by underplaying it, portraying his disgust by being civilized. In the end, the music becomes so dramatic, and the speech so simple that the film culminates in an explosive “Grow up, or die!”

Bill Maher, is evidently a master rhetorician using his ethos to his benefit, presenting very serious ideas in frivolous ways. An entire blog post could be dedicated to his use of decorum. But his appeal to pathos is even more masterful. He uses the very same fear-indulging tactics that his religious contenders have used through the ages. He knows how to set up the audience to become afraid and susceptible, eagerly awaiting for whatever answers Bill has to say. It is difficult to end the movie without feeling hatred for religion. The purpose is masterfully accomplished. He makes his audience hate religion and love Bill. 

How Decorous of You

Carl Sagan's delivery of the Gettysburg Battle commemorative speech is such a rhetorical prowess.  The rhetorical skills employed in the speech are alone worth analyzing, but even more fascinating is Sagan's mastering of his decorum.

Sagan, in being there, being who he was, possesses all the three qualities of a persuasive ethos proposed in "Thank You for Arguing".

Without having heard a word from the speaker, the audience already has a certain predisposition for trusting Sagan, as he is a notable representative of science, the discipline of logic, evidence, questioning. People's beliefs regarding religion, politics, morals are all personal and often irrational, but when it comes to empirical evidence, few have the guts to disagree. People believe Sagan shares their values, because he believes in logic and proof, and those are unifying agents in an increasingly skeptical society. 

Most of the speech is just facts and figures about events which relate to the topic. For example, he opens the speech with, "Fifty-one thousand human beings were killed or wounded here..." These facts were undeniable, especially in a time without smart phones. Sagan's use of facts is a straightforward demonstration of his character and also a proof of his practical wisdom. He makes people believe he knows what he is talking about because, as a scientist, he values truth, therefore, beyond the fact that the topics covered are not of scientific nature, they must be true and relevant because that is the way Carl works. 

The mere presence of Sagan delivering the speech is the demonstration of the third quality: selflessness or disinterest. Sagan is not a politician, he is not in arms race for power, he is a simple academic with strong convictions. By delivering that speech it seems as if he is not doing it to achieve some personal interest. He has, in fact, not much to win by reprimanding the behavior of the two strongest nations in the world at the moment, and sadly a lot to lose. And yet, he does it anyway, because his true interest is the safety of humanity, not just Americans, but humans. 

All in all, Sagan's speech accounts for half of the persuasive techniques used. His mastering of decorum is what prepares the audience to listen attentively to what Sagan has to say. If the same speech was delivered by a republican presidential candidate (highly unlikely) the story would have been different. 

Applied

Today I tried convincing my parents to let me cook instead of ordering fast food. I failed. Despite that, there are a few things I can recover from the attempt, such as my first conscientious application of the concepts presented in Chapters 1 and 2 of "Thank You for Arguing". 

There were three clear appeals and tenses in my argument. Following the line of Logos, Ethos, Pathos my chain of thought was: "Take out is unhealthy.  We are all trying to lose weight, and there are plenty of veggies awaiting in the fridge. It is also cheaper and faster to cook than to order. Plus you love my food, and know that the result will be exquisite because I am such a great cook. You know what? I can even make you those pork carnitas you love so much and have wanted for a while. Remember how we used to eat tacos every Sunday when you were together?"

It worked perfectly, I had them convinced at the prospect of a free, delicious, heartwarming meal that would take us back to those careless days when we were a family and everything was alright. Needless to say, there was nothing careless or alright about those days, as no time has ever been like that, but the taste of slow roasted pork obliterates memory. 

Then my mother remembered that she always ends up cleaning the dishes, and that I am very messy when not scolded by an irritated, fire spitting chef. That was the deal breaker. 

Still, I am quite proud that I managed to set my personal argument, set the goal for my audience, and accomplished persuasion by changing their opinion on delivery, stimulating their emotions on home cooking, and getting them to act (I was already setting the pots on the burners when Mom informed me they were no longer necessary).

From this experience I concluded, rhetoric is like physics. After learning about them, you have a deeper understanding of the concepts behind the facts. I can no longer feel a car break suddenly without thinking about inertia. I can no longer see any advertisement without knowing they are appealing to pathos. 

Ni Chicha Ni Limoná

Ghttps://docs.google.com/a/cng.edu/file/d/0B0liDXUjLAa8NDcwSE1tQ0RGTEE/edit?usp=docslist_api

Why?

I was surprised when I found Wu Tang Clan's "36 Chambers" in the 99 cent record section. Then I remembered I was in a rock record store. Needless to say I bought it. A few days later, I was walking by Fredrick Douglass boulevard around 134 st. when I heard my favorite track from that record coming out of a little joint. Only now do I understand the beauty of that conjunction.

After reading Douglass' memoir, I listen to "Can It Be All So Simple" differently. 

The memoir's ending feels rushed, a bit exhausted, just as I imagine Douglass feels after all he has done. The last paragraph of the narration is so unlike Douglass' solemn, ceremonial tone that it doesn't feel like the ending of the story. The reader does not sense closure. The ending is not happy, I feel. When Douglass says in his last paragraph, "The truth was, I felt myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down." He reminds the reader of how much more work is yet to be done. Douglass learned that official freedom does not mean credibility, or equality. I am reminded by Douglass' remark of the times he wished he hadn't been born, of how his circumstance made his life so tough, just because he was born of black parents. 

The song's title "Can It Be All So Simple" is a straightforward longing for tranquility. In the song RZA and Ghost talk about the hardships they had to pass while growing up. The arbitrariness of being born to your family, social class, ethnicity, is the factor that sadly determines in a good part, your live's fate. Why can't it be simpler for us? They asked in the 1990's. Douglass asked the same question a century before. 

This book leaves me with a distaste for humanity, but also a certain drive toward bettering the situation. I firmly believe that an imposed condition as is skin color, gender, sexual orientation, etc should not be the limiting agent of a life. I know that an equitable world is but a dream. Because I do not recur to faith in order to justify monstrosity, and because I believe there is no true justification for it, all I am left with is the book in my hand, the record on my table, and the thought that perhaps art, by transforming temporary disgrace into eternal beauty, is the only thing that makes everything worth it. 

In the words of Walt Whitman:

"Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,

But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another

(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,

Yet out of that I have written these songs)."

I'd Rather Go Blind Boy

One sentence delivered in Douglass' "American Slavery, American Religion, and the Free Church of Scotland" address reminded me particularly of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". After discussing the tactics used by slave owners to diminish a slave's spirit through constant abuse so that he forever accepts his condition, Douglass says,  "If a slave has a bad master his ambition is to get a better; when he gets a better, he aspires to have the best; and when he gets the best, he aspires to be his own master." In the Allegory of the Cave, men who during their entire lives saw only the shadows of objects and then get the opportunity to see the actual object, never want to go back to the unclear shadows.

 Neither the slaves who haven't grasped a sense of liberty, or the men who have not witnessed three-dimensionality miss any of the latter. Equally, if one only experiences excess of what has been denied, the alternative then does not seem as tempting. 

This was one of the tactics used by slave owners to discourage any longing for freedom. On holidays, slaves were forced to succumb to excessive intoxicating activities, thinking they were enjoying a touch of freedom, when in fact this was just another savvy tactic from their owners. At the end of each holidays, all slaves would be so sick and miserable that they longed no more for freedom. It is as if the men in the cave only saw humanity's most lascivious acts when shown the outer world, like if they were taken to a Southern cotton plantation while any of the masters was committing a brutality such as the many described by Douglass. 

Douglass never succumbed to those excesses, he was well aware of the mischief behind them. Whatever glimpses of freedom he did experience served only to enlarge his appetite for it. He knew what freedom meant, and would not be fooled by anyone in his attempt to achieve it.  

Compliance

Faith is not concerned with reason. Frederick Douglass often questioned (righteously) the existence of the benevolent, wise god he was raised to believe in. Ironically, in his most desperate moments, a simultaneous disbelief and attachment to the abstract figure emerged in him. Often after bantering about religion, and doubting on the existence of God, he would say something like, "...in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom..." This reminds me of the verse by Vinicus de Moraes 

"Quero só que surjas em mim 

como a fé nos desesperados"

Perhaps the only topic Douglass feels ambiguously about in his narrative is religion. Throughout the book he uses the word pious to describe the many slave holder's hypocritical display of virtue. The word pious can also be ascribed to the description of anyone devoutly religious, be them hypocritical or not.  A word which can potentially describe two very distant characters as are Douglass and any of his devout masters is then by nature ambiguous, as is religion. 

The role of religion in the development and sustainability of the "institution" of slavery in America is pivotal to say the least. In my research on the subject, I found an address delivered by Douglass in London in 1846 called "American Slavery, American Religion, and the Free Church of Scotland." Here Douglass develops on Christian derived churches' scandalous role in slavery's proliferation on American soil. In his address he denounces, "I have to inform you that the religion of the southern states, at this time, is the great supporter, the greater sanctioner of the bloody atrocities to which I have referred." And later states "As a proof of this, I need not do more than state the general fact, that slavery has existed under the droppings of the sanctuary of the south, for the last 200 years, and there has not been any war between the religion and the slavery of the south." Douglass needs not to restate the facts so evident in any segment of his memoir. Yet, it is curious to me how Douglass, aware of his religion's compliant role in the worst affair conducted by mankind, still chooses to subscribe to that faith.

Douglass' protest against the church and insistent attachment to it is a clear proof of the distinction between organized religion and faith. Today more than ever, it is evident that both can exist separately. 

Douglass chooses to continue believing. Faith has served an important purpose in his life, a most important role of moral support. In his own words, "I love the religion of our blessed Saviour, I love that religion that comes from above, in the wisdom of God, which is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy." Douglass is therefore, according to the dictionary simultaneously, pious and not pious. 

A Road of Adjectives

I guess I must have been feeling humorous when I sat down the other day to fulfil my reading duties of Frederick Douglass's memoir because the contrasting seriousness of the tone was  so inescapably evident. Even so, I wouldn't go as far as to describe the book's tone as dry because the employment of picturesque adjectives splashes the otherwise grim prose with vividness.

Adjectives, fancy ones I must add, are Douglass's appeal to pathos. 

Douglass's descriptions of the sinister Mr. Gore are dense and powerful. He writes, "He was cruel enough to inflict the severest punishment, article enough to descend to the lowest trickery, and obdurate enough to be insensible to the voice of a reproving conscience." There are two adjectives for every noun in this sentence. The description is in the breach of wordiness, and yet the insistence in using adjectives serves to demonstrate Douglass's passion toward the subject. Each descriptive word is an argument of feelings. The reader must understand the severity of the affair. The reader must understand that adjectives are not placed at random to adorn the prose. Douglass employs adjectives with enthusiasm because it is the best way to portray the reality of the affair. If the reader is not moved by the text, there is not point in writing it at all. We could apply an AP Lang wordy sentence exercise and streak all of the passion from the sentence. Mr. Gore, after all, is just a cruel man. But then there is no point in immortalizing those events. Was the descriptive language not present, we might as well be reading a casualty record from the time, cold and meaningless. 

The Blues Don't Change

It is no accident that the reader of Frederick Douglass's self written memoir gets a sensation of skimming through a historical fact book when reading the first pages of his book. A person like Douglass needs not to appeal to rhetorical or literary devices  in order to compel his audience with his writing. The facts speak for themselves. 

When describing his years as a slave, the author takes precaution not to make hasty generalizations about slavery and its surrounding components (although we do get the suspicion that the experience as a slave did not vary greatly from plantation to plantation). One of the most compelling aspects of slave idiosyncrasy that he touches upon is the use of singing as an emotional relief while at work. To him, the echoing howls of working men and women connote grave sadness. To others a celebratory moment comes to mind. Altogether, chanting served a greater purpose: helping the exploited stay alive. In the last paragraph of chapter two Douglass says,

"The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them only as an aching heart is relieved by tears." and then he modestly clarifies "At least such is my experience." 

It is insensitive not to recognize the future cultural importance of the events portrayed in these pages. To sit down and read the book knowing the tale contains no fiction feels insensitive by principle. Nevertheless, we must recognize that few slaves gained the opportunity of literacy and even fewer put that knowledge to work as Douglass did. This quality makes American African-descendent legacy in its majority not written but verbal and cultural. And one of our most immediate contacts with African legacy tody is music. Those "rude and apparently incoherent songs" Douglass describes with affliction are the root of an immense tree of musical heritage. Still, a century later you could listen to the intense woe of the black man in early blues recordings of Son House or the later John Lee Hooker. Even life for the early twentieth century jazz singer Bessie Brown wasn't all that different from that of her ancestors, spending her youth in the cotton fields and the church singing her way through the heat of the laborious day. The blues is a product of chanting and gospel, and everything else is a product of the blues. 

That is an unignorable fact.

,

I searched the web for a recording that would transport me back to the sorrowful plantation fields. This was I close as I got. It is a recording of black inmates singing while labouring in the 1930s. 

Not a Sonnet of Possibility

This is not a piece of writing that I like, but rather the one I dislike the least from an ongoing list of embarrassing works that constitute my writing trajectory. After the AP Literature exam last year, Mr. Ferrebee challenged us to write a sonnet directed to ourselves in five years predicting who we would be by then. I clearly failed in my attempt and instead (cowardly) wrote this free verse poem. The failed Sonnet of Possibility is the piece of writing I dislike the least because I can still identify with the author of the poem and I can assure it is, at least, honest.

The Part. The Whole.

It's not much what I have to say regarding the distinction between a blog and a blog post. I know the difference, I accept it. Nevertheless, I've discovered, it is not uncommon for people to make this type of mistake. The  erroneous inverse synecdoche (where the whole is used to refer to a part) is the nature of one too many unnecessary confusions in human communication. 
I remember I was once employed by a very misinterpretable pastry chef. On her account I was responsible for many irrecuperable mistakes, as she was incapable of understanding the difference between an egg and its parts: the yolk and the white. There was this one time where I, having mastered the art of zesting lemons and weighing sugar, was put to the more challenging task of making french meringue, which I knew a was deceivingly easy job. I also knew the constituents of this recipe were exclusively eggs whites and sugar. So you might imagine the pool of confusion into which I fell when the chef pattisier verbally ordered me to beat the eggs first for a while before slowly incorporating the sugar. Eggs? Cautiously, I checked the recipe book one more time just in case I and the rest of humanity had misread eggs for egg whites. But she insisted "Remember, the eggs must be at room temperature." "Stop the machine when the blades leave a clear mark on the eggs." She almost had a heart attack when I, submissively,  started beating whole eggs. As a result I had to develop a keen intuition for guessing what she actually meant by egg. I also know this guy that refers to song as record.  Why?! In what world...? Ironically he is a musician. 

I sympathize with Mr. Wickman. It is too troublesome and exhausting to be guessing what people mean because they use the wrong words.  A word by nature has a meaning, and if when utilizing the word the meaning does not correspond with what you mean to say, the whole purpose of language is defeated. 

A blog is not a blog post, an egg is not an egg white. Say what you mean and avoid misinterpretation, the world bears enough of it already.