Global Warming is Good For You

     Once again I must begin with a disclaimer.  The current topic in my blogging class is propaganda, and our assignment this week is to write a satire of typical propaganda techniques, in the form of a piece of our own sarcastic propaganda.  This is a humor piece; do not take anything in this post seriously.

     Well, actually, please do take that first paragraph seriously.  Then again, the first paragraph says that you should not take either of these last two sentences seriously. *

     Okay, the following sentence is the only one in this post that you should take seriously:

     This entire post is intended as tongue-in-cheek, so do not take it seriously, except for this sentence, which you should take seriously.

     In other words, everything after this sentence should not be taken seriously.


     Science has now generally accepted that global warming is not a hoax.  Indeed, global warming is very real.

     However, liberal pundits have taken this to mean, without question, that we must combat global warming, and prevent it from advancing any further than it already has, and these propagandists, seeing things only in black and white, use this kind of absurd leap in logic, to great effect, to befuddle, the general, masses.  They also like using a lot of commas.

     This conspiracy exists to subvert the good old apple-pie family values of honest, right-thinking Americans such as you and me (not ‘I’).  Think of the children!

     Moreover, look at how this idea of “fighting” global warming conflicts with American patriotism!  Tell me now, which is more important:  The star-spangled symbol of this righteous nation and the freedoms it represents, or some kind of an ozone layer way up there where I can’t even see it?

     No, these devious conspirators’ (not ‘conspirators’s’) true purpose is to divert our attention and resources from stopping their treacherous financial schemes!

     …but this is getting off point. What was the point again? Oh yes: “Global Warming is Good For You.”

     Well, first of all, warmer soil means better agriculture, which is good for such traditionally chilled regions as Minnesota, bringing greater revenue to this great American state. Second, less ice on roads will make winter driving safer, reducing health care costs in Minnesota and helping to rein in spending in Washington. And finally, a warmer all-around climate will undoubtedly encourage long-stagnant tourism to such great American states as Minnesota. If you have any problems with global warming, I suggest you move to Minnesota.

     In conclusion, if you don’t act now to end this sham before it’s too late and start welcoming global warming as the short-term financial gain it represents, then blah blah blah trouble in Pine River City, Minnesota.

     * Also: This statement is false.

     Fun factoid: The official website for Pine River, Minnesota features the slogan: "Now totally paved!"

     Holy crud. Having already written this post, I discovered that someone else had already written it. I won’t link to it directly - just Google "thomas gale moore" "global warming benefits" and it should be the first hit.

     I love how ‘Google’ has become a verb.

     Anyway, I was just gobsmacked by the similarity between my humorous blog post and this RESEARCH PAPER FROM A PH.D. Well, I set out to satirize this kind of thing…and I guess you could say I succeeded.

     In the interest of reporting as unbiased as I can manage, here is a link to further writings of Dr. Moore, and, on the opposing side, a game based on his writings.

     Much as I am trying to keep politics out of this blog, it appears they have snuck in.  However, recall that this post is based on an assignment of satire, and while my satire may show one angle, recall my recursive disclaimer, and you will realize that I may indeed have written a counter-satire, in which case my true beliefs might fall on an unexpected side of the "aisle"; or, indeed, I may have intended a counter-counter-satire…

     Perhaps I intended to parody the writings of those who dislike the highly educational method of imparting knowledge that they deride as "propaganda."  Or, indeed, those who dislike parodies of the writings of those who dislike…

     Perhaps I have no political beliefs whatsoever, and have cleverly tricked you into thinking that I do.

     In any case, as I am writing this, I am sick.  Maybe all of this was just the virus talking.

We interrupt this blog…

     Yes, that is an advertisement.  I’m actually going to ask you to have a close look at it.  Clicking on it should give you the full-size image.
     I should begin by saying that I am not associated in any way with Honda, I do not endorse Honda or its Odyssey, and I was not paid to publish that advertisement - it’s actually the subject of my assignment for this week.  I scanned that image from a magazine, and I have reproduced it here for the purpose of review (given that I just posted their ad here for free, I think they can hardly complain).

     Go ahead and click on it, and check out the full-size ad.  Look at it for about ten seconds.  When the ten seconds are up, close the image and think for a moment about what it was trying to tell you.  Then come back to this post.  I'll wait right here.

     In his treatise “Rhetoric,” Aristotle described three modes of persuasion:

• Logos (logical appeal) is based on facts, information, data, etc., regarding the subject.
• Ethos (ethical appeal) is based on the character of the party doing the persuading.
• Pathos (emotional appeal) is based on the character of the party being persuaded, speaking to the wants, needs and emotions of the audience.

     These concepts outdate advertisements in any recognizable sense by a millennium or two, but, as we will see, they are still applicable today.

     Consider this advertisement for the Honda Odyssey.  A semicircle of water and a rainbow frame the subject of the ad, immediately drawing our eyes to the Odyssey itself.  The van is off-center overall, but the arcs surrounding it create the impression that it is in its own little world.

     Quite a world it is!  The pool of shining water around the Odyssey is in stark contrast to the asphalt around it…and, as our eyes travel outward, we see that the contrast continues between the mundane urban world and the fantastical world of the Odyssey.  Sunshine, rainbows and butterflies - beauty and elegance.  The lily pond and deer - nature.

     Compare that with the fading, out-of-focus city all around the Odyssey's bubble.  The only greenery outside of the bubble consists of neatly pruned shrubs enclosed in concrete.  We see a lamppost, with an exit sign attached.  More subtly, in the upper-left corner we can see what is apparently a corporate office building…or was.  It has evaporated, its outline vanished, its remains wafting into the heavens.

     The caption tells us that the Odyssey is "the van of your dreams"; this dreamworld appeals to a desire to escape from the dreary metropolis into a more pleasing plane of existence.  I hardly have to tell you that this is pathos through and through - and we identify easily with the woman staring, dumbfounded, at the natural wonders within the bubble.

     The display of nature, however, leads us into another mode of persuasion.  What's that on the deer?  28 miles per gallon - and the placement of this number is no accident: it equates the Odyssey's mileage with nature, telling you that buying the Odyssey is good for nature…and, by extension, it says that Honda cares about the environment.  This is, of course, an ethical appeal - ethos.

     I should add that the stated MPG is, more directly, a simple form of logos.  Indeed, once the artistic pathos has captured our attention, we find that the ad has plenty of straightforward logos, presented as the only text in the ad.  (Third row folds down; available Bluetooth; 28 hwy mpg; V-6 engine.)

     Finally our eyes fall on the largest word on the page, located in the bottom-right so as to be seen last: Odyssey.  "Introducing the all-new Honda Odyssey."  Ideally that word, "Odyssey," should resonate in the reader's mind when they are finished with the ad.

     I mentioned identification with the dumbfounded woman in the ad.  Who exactly is meant to identify with her?

     I found this ad in a cooking magazine, whose audience presumably consists mainly of women (I myself got it from my grandmother).  Well, the only human figure in the ad is indeed a woman.  Her clothing implies a sense of metropolitan fashion, but her vivid shoes, rolled-up jeans and especially her colorful shirt also imply a desire for something less conforming - which might explain why she is so impressed by the otherworldly bubble.

     We see that she has been shopping - and those are not cheap grocery bags she's holding, they obviously represent a more important (read: expensive) kind of purchase.  New shoes, perhaps, or a designer outfit.  She probably drove through quite a bit of the aforementioned mundane urban metropolis, to get to the store, and she probably spent quite a bit of time picking out whatever is in the bags, and quite a bit of money in purchasing it.  Now, however, the goods hang dejected at her side, completely forgotten in the wonder of the moment.

     So then what we see throughout the image is from this woman's point of view.  The exit is out of focus, the building behind her (perhaps her place of employment) is now naught but a fading memory.  She looks at this van and sees, in her mind's eye, all of the wonders that surround it in the image.  Since we are supposed to be identifying with her, we get a window into her imagination, and we see those wonders, too.

     All of this is meant to be assimilated in a glance, which is probably all that it's going to get from the average reader…but a glance is enough.  That glance will fall directly into the Odyssey's bubble, invoking the ad's pathos.  Then, as the reader turns the page, he or she will catch a glimpse of that one highlighted word: "Odyssey."  The rest will be absorbed subliminally - most of these details will never be noticed outright, but a reader who spends as much as two or three seconds looking at the intriguing image will completely understand the overall message conveyed.

     That's an awful lot of subliminal messaging - it took me over 750 words to explain everything that's going on in this ad, and so the magazine's reader is expected to absorb 750 words of information in just a few seconds.

     So, going back to your ten-second examination when we started: How much of this stuff did you glean from that quick look?  How much was readily apparent?  How much was there that you didn't really think about at the time, but were nodding your head in agreement when I brought it up?

     Take another look back at the ad.  This time, don't limit yourself to ten seconds - take as much time as you need to recognize and understand all of the subtle elements…and the next time you see an ad on TV or in a magazine, take a moment to think about the kind of appeals it uses.  Is its message dominated by logos, ethos, or pathos?  How much of the message is expressed outright, and how much of it depends on subliminal manipulation?

     The people who make these advertisements can be pretty tricky.  Perhaps all of this knowledge will make you a more savvy consumer; perhaps it was just an interesting read…or maybe I just bored you to tears with a three-page essay about a car ad.  If so, then I apologize, and I hope my next post will be more to your liking…and, if it was that boring for you reading it, imagine me writing it!

Two Book Reviews and Some Rambling

     My assignment for this week is to write a book review on a book of my choice. I’m supposed to select a specific “audience” to address, and then write a review that either encourages that audience to read the book, or explains in excruciating detail why that audience should not read the book.
     I chose to review “The Great Gatsby” because that happened to be what I was reading at the time, but I wasn’t yet sure whether I would be writing a favorable or an unfavorable review.
     Well, I’m still not sure. The thing is, I don’t yet know who my audience is. I have no idea what your literary preferences may be.
     So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to write two book reviews, intended for different audiences - one favorable, one unfavorable - and hopefully one of them will apply to you.

     F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (or: Liebestod) is a romantic tragedy in the great tradition of Shakespeare. The members of the fated cast of characters all begin quite distant from one another, but their lives become inexorably intertwined.
     The author speaks through the voice of Nick Carraway, an innocent observer who is gradually dragged deeper and deeper into the novel’s events. He inadvertantly moves in next door to the mansion of the mysterious Gatsby, and eventually begins to attend Gatsby’s weekly parties.
     Who is Jay Gatsby? We never learn the whole truth, but we know that he and Daisy were in love, years ago, before Gatsby went overseas to fight in the war. Uncertain of his survival, Daisy eventually married…but a piece of her heart remains with Gatsby.
     If Daisy were the only one with split affections, the plot would be a good deal more straightforward. That is not the case. Her husband is having an affair with the mechanic’s wife.
     Had Gatsby never moved to New York City, positioning himself deliberately near Daisy, events would have continued as they were for quite a while - but Gatsby does move in, and Daisy returns to him…half-heartedly.
     Her husband, Tom, is jealous of Gatsby, and Gatsby is jealous of Tom. The mechanic’s wife is jealous of Daisy, and the mechanic himself is jealous of…well, everybody; he knows that his wife is being unfaithful to him, but he doesn’t know with whom.
     This tangled web engulfs the entire cast. Even as more and more strands of hatred are added to this web, it is ever so slowly stretched thinner and thinner until, under the ominous, ever-present gaze of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg…it snaps.
     Boy, does it ever snap. Fitzgerald’s masterpiece draws the unsuspecting reader in, and will hold you until the bitter end.

     F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (or: “Four Attempted Weddings and Assorted Funerals) consists of almost 200 pages of character development. Nothing happens for almost the entire duration of the book.
     The narrator falls in love with the best friend of his favorite cousin, who is married to a guy he went to college with, but this guy is having an affair with the mechanic’s wife. Meanwhile this other mysterious guy is in love with the cousin, and she’s kinda in love with him, cause they knew each other, like, five years ago, but she also sorta loves her husband, but then the mechanic’s wife thinks that the best friend in the yellow car is the college guy’s wife, and the mechanic thinks that the other guy in the yellow car at a totally different time is the guy who’s having an affair with his wife, and then the college guy tattles on the mysterious guy. Hilarity ensues!
     No, seriously, this is the point at which the author begins to employ various colorful metaphors for death, and then the narrator gets all sullen, at which point, once again, nothing happens.
     In short, a pointless story of love out the wazoo.

     My point here is at a larger scale than just a review of one book. My point is that differing perspectives can result in dramatically different opinions. An individual’s tastes are more important to enjoyment than the subject matter itself.
     Oddly enough, I was able to appreciate each of the above viewpoints, to an extent, while reading the book, which is why I still can’t say whether I like it or not. Part of me really enjoyed the powerful form of the novel, and part of me genuinely found it mind-bogglingly dull.


     This whole line of thought reminds me of a comment I wrote last week on a classmate’s blog post. As I mention in “About Me” (over in the upper-right corner), this blog exists because of the writing class I am currently taking (Argumentative Writing and Blogging). My first post, entitled “Writing,” is a kind of homework paper on an assigned topic, and everyone in the class wrote a blog post on the same subject…
     More or less. I was really surprised by the wide variety of perspectives and interpretations among my classmates. Every student’s post was quite different from all of the others, but each was good in its own way.
     To see what I mean, read the blog post at the following URL and compare it to my first one (“Writing”). For convenience, I have reprinted my comment below. 

http://partialtopink.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-writing-changes-us.html

I find it interesting to compare our posts for this assignment. As you know, the question to be answered here was: "Why is writing important?" I interpreted this quite differently than you did. 

I took the question to mean something like "Why are writing skills important, and how is writing relevant to our daily lives?" My answer can be found on my own blog, at: http://the-occasional-post.blogspot.com/2011/02/writing.html 

It was not until I read your post that I realized that the original question may be interpreted in more than one way. You read the same question and saw it as something quite different, summed up nicely in the title you gave this post: "How writing changes us." 

As you can see by comparing your post and mine, these differing perspectives resulted in posts that are - to use your phrase - "like night and day." While I provided facts, statistics, and analysis, you shared the story of your own journey - the experiences of how writing has changed you. 

While I hope that my post is educational and interesting, yours is personal and motivational. While I explain why writing is intellectually necessary, you make a compelling case that it is emotionally valuable. 

From the very first paragraph of each post, a reader can immediately tell that they will be radically different…but both present perfectly valid styles, and, in my opinion, both posts provide perfectly acceptable answers to why writing is important. 

Incidentally, my favorite of all the "Writing" posts in our class can be found here.