Ireland: The National Famine Memorial

Two summer's ago my family and I decided it was time to "visit the Motherland", and we took a two-week trip to Ireland. We stayed in a house on the west side of Ireland and traveled all over County Mayo and visited Galway, Ireland: a port city.  One day on our trip, my sister, my dad and I decided to hike up Croagh Patrick Moutain (picture above). Legend has it that St. Patrick climbed this mountain as a pilgrimage in forty days, and each year on a day called "Reek Sunday" around 15,000 people make a holy pilgrimage up this mountain...barefoot.  It has to be painful! From experience hiking this mountain (with shoes), I can tell you that the path you see is made completely of loose, jagged stones. We did meet some people in our journey up the mountain climbing barefoot but we soon passed them as they moved slowly and deliberately in pain.  While I could tell you some interesting stories about our climb up Croagh Patrick mountain,  I instead want to focus on a monument my mom discovered back down at sea level.

The first two pictures above are pictures of the National Famine Memorial in County Mayo. ( I had my own pictures, but i bought a new laptop before college and my pictures are saved back home.)  Many of you know the "Great Famine", as it is called in Ireland, as the "Irish Potato Famine" which occurred between the years of 1845 and 1852.  The famine was caused by a potato blight that left potatoes, the main food source for the impoverished Irish people, inedible.  The famine took the lives of over 1 million Irish people and caused the emigration from Ireland of 1 million more.  There are memorials across the country for this historic disaster, and each one tells an interesting aspect of the story of the famine through rhetoric. I want to focus on the one I saw personally and discuss how the sculpture conveys a story through its composition.

As you walk towards the structure you see an old, dark ship, and you begin to understand a story of travel. The ship is angled away from the inland and towards the bay which indicates a story of emigration instead of immigration.  You notice that the ship is in poor condition, it is dingy, dark and lacks sails. The masts to support the sails remain, and eerily look like crosses that you would find above a grave. You also see what looks like waves rolling along the sides of the ship, but from your viewpoint you can quite make out what they are. The story of the sculpture has enticed you, so you approach the sculpture to examine it closer.

When you reach the sculpture the message finally hits you like a mordant surprise. What you assumed were waves are really skeletons of famine victims.  The entire story can now be interpreted.  The skeletons seem to make up the ship, much like the famine makes up a large part of Ireland's history.  Their bodies are contoured in the shape of waves an many look like they are trying to jump off of the ship.  This tells that their emigration was an escape from certain death to a less certain death.  Many of the emigrants knew that they may not make it to America, but they were willing to risk the journey to avoid a certain death staying on the starving island.

Finally, the dark color scheme and jagged and spindly composition of the ship and the skeletons convey this event as a grim moment in the history of Ireland.  The Great Famine is a major part of the Irish heritage and a source of sadness.  Ireland lost close to 25% of its population in the great famine and this monument conveys a story of a struggle up to the point of death for the Irish people.  It is a story of sadness in which lucky people would risk death and emigrate from the homeland they loved, while the unlucky people stayed back and faced hardship, starvation and certain death.

Shakespeare's love of Puns

This semester I am taking a course on Shakespeare and we will read nine of his plays throughout the course.  We are on the fourth play now, As You Like It, and as I read his plays and am becoming more familiar with Shakespearean style I have noticed his strong use of Rhetoric through puns.  I have found his use of homonyms and figures of speech as an interesting and effective way to engage the audience on more than one level of intellectual pleasure, reveal key plot themes and characterization, and of course provide humor.

In the Taming of the Shrew, Gremio, Petruchio's servant, speculates the courting between a forceful and witty Petruchio and Kate the loud, obnoxious and witty shrew.  He says, "I'll tell you what sir, and she stand him but a little, he will throw a figure in her face and so disfigure her with that she shall have no more eyes to see withal than cat" (Taming of the Shrew, 1.2.111-115). Gremio employs a figure of speech and plays on the words "figure" and "disfigure" to create humor and reveal elements of character of the recently introduced courtier Petruchio.  In this instance the word "figure" means a figure of speech or pun or insult that Petruchio will present Kate with when courting.  The word "disfigure" creates symmetry in the sentence and plays on the word figure by using it in a physical sense. He uses disfigure meaning that Petruchio's speech will cause her face to become distorted in confusion, disgust, or anger.  Gremio's pun is only noticed by the attentive and educated listener, and creates another level of comedy in the play for them.  It also reveals information about the main characters and their future interactions in the play.

Shakespeare loved puns so much that they often speckle his histories, romances, and even tragedies. Because his plays were performed in a oral style, he utilized the effects of homonyms to create humor and reveal plot. In Richard III Shakespeare employs the use of homonyms in the first two lines of Richard's opening soliloquy: "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York" (Richard III).  The homonym used here is "son" and "sun". The parallel structure of the line creates a powerful image in the listener's mind of winter yielding to summer, just as Lancaster yields to York in the play.  Just as the sun brings an end to winter, the son of York brought an end to the discontent by bringing peace.

Many of Shakespeare's puns can create bawdy humor when uncovered in his plays, and perhaps I'll focus a future blog on this aspect of Shakespeare's use of puns. However, in this blog I displayed Shakespeare love of puns by means of word play.  Classic rhetorers valued the artistic style of the written and spoken word just as much, if not more than its content.  Shakespeare's use of puns and word play make it clear that he held these same values.  However, his puns often served as another level of intellectual enjoyment for educated members of the audience, and revealed key plot and character developments in the play.  Shakespeare's love of puns displays one aspect of his love of rhetoric, and his ability to employ rhetoric to serve many purposes in his plays makes him one of the greatest writers of all time.

The Rhetoric of Super Bowl Commericals

After watching the Super Bowl I found myself in the midst of the perfect kairotic moment to discuss the rhetorical appeals used in Super Bowl commercials.  One of my favorite commercials of the night was Bridgestone Tire's commercial in which the conservative driver and the beaver scratch each others' backs.  A company will pay millions of dollars for each second of air time during the Super Bowl, so they know their ad sells. I will analyze just what it is that makes their ad sell to the public under the categories of ethos, logos, and pathos, and conclude with the reason why targeting these appeals is so effective in the advertising market.

As the busy beaver precariously meanders into the one lane road we begin to cringe as we see a car zooming to carry him to his certain death. However, just before the messy crash we catch a glimpse of the driver as he swerves swiftly around the beaver. In that two second picture the company has created a foundation of ethos with the audience.  The driver is smartly dressed, but nothing too fancy, so we see him as an average business man or office employee.  His key characteristics are his glasses, and his "couldn't hurt a fly" build.  His glasses give him the persona of a smart consumer. One who doesn't live outside his means, but demands quality from his products. Finally, his non-muscular build makes him an average person who tries not to harm others, even if he had the ability to do so.  In the first eight seconds of their ad, Bridgestone has appealed to and leveled with their target audience: average Americans who are smart consumers living within their means, but demanding quality from their products.

The quality of the product, Bridgestone Tires, is displayed in both the opening of the first and second scene. This is a direct appeal to logos, or the logic of the audience.  In the first scene, the car is able to dart around the beaver and on to the one lane bridge without a large decrease in speed. In the second scene, the car comes to a dead halt after skidding just a few inches when the driver slams the brakes in a bad rainstorm to avoid hitting a fallen tree.  While viewers may question the reality of these conditions, they do not doubt that Bridgestone makes good tires, and the company is effectively selling their product appealing to the audience's logic by demonstrating the quality of their tires.

Logic, however, is not the big seller in this commercial, and it hardly ever is. It is the pathetic story of kindness between the driver and the beaver that wins the audience's hearts. As I watched this commercial, all I could think of as the beaver was about to be pulverized was how cute it was.  In the second scene, after the heroic driver saved the beavers life, it was the beaver's turn to return the favor.  He gnaws down the tree as he anticipates the arrival of his friend and it falls just in time for the driver to screech to a halt (with good tires) and watch as the bridge he was about to cross gets washed away by the flooding river.  As the driver and the audience exhale after his near death experience he looks over and sees his friend the beaver. Then they have a heartwarming moment as the beaver signals "I got your back" to the driver, and the driver responds in shocked amusement. The appeal to the audience's pathos is the product's strongest selling point.  Even the most conservative consumers will often think with their heart before their head. As they shop for tires they will remember the honorable and heartwarming tale that comes with the Bridgestone product, and will unconsciously trust the product more.

Advertisers know the formula to connect with their audience and sell their product.  Many consumers are more likely to trust a product based solely on recognition with that product from an advertisement.  The commercial appealed to the ethos of the smart consumer, the logos of the product's quality, and finally the heartwarming pathetic appeal of the reciprocal kindness of the beaver and the driver.  At the end of the commercial the audience was happy and may have even laughed like I did. They were happy that the beaver and the driver were okay. The beaver and the driver were happy that the car had Bridgestone tires, and the advertisers were hoping that you were too.

Facebook and the Rhetoric of a Revolution

2,500 years ago Aristotle defined rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given situation the available means of persuasion"  This means that any rhetorical situation requires a "call to action" or an exigence, a means of communication, and an audience to be influenced in some way.

Aristotle could never fathom the rhetorical situation we live in today.  There are millions of exigences being addressed each day through mediums that reach a world wide audience within seconds. This is the rhetorical situation that is the driving force behind the protest movements in Tunisia, Egypt, and now possibly Sudan.

Social media such as Facebook and Twitter are powerful means of rhetorical exchange.  You can keep tabs on old friends by reading your news feed on Facebook or following them on Twitter. You can invite numerous friends to an event in a matter of minutes instead of a few days. You can even start a revolution to oust a long-standing regime in your country...or at least that's what young people in the Middle East are discovering.

The people of Tunisia and Egypt identified their current government as oppressive and demanded change. The dissatisfaction with their government was their exigence, and they utilized social media such as Facebook as the best available means for addressing this problem.

Before Facebook, Twitter, and cellphones, the protesters' audience would have been small, centered around a central figure, and lacking the power to contest the current regime.  However, the young group of protesters recognized Facebook as the best available means for delivering their message.  Within days the protesters' audience had grown from a few hundred people to tens of thousands of citizens calling for a revolution. Facebook and social media has shifted the Rhetorical situation from a single sender/receiver relationship to a collective conversation and constant exchange of ideas.

This claim is supported by the countries in the Middle East who are participating in this rhetorical conversation.  The situation in Tunisia compelled the receptive audience in Egypt to address their own exigence. The audience has become the senders, and the images of organized revolt are rapidly spreading to other countries in the Middle East craving freedom, and has alerted the world of the power of social media in the rhetorical situation.

Facebook and other social media has become the best available means for addressing a broad audience instantaneously.  Hundreds of exigencies are addressed each minute and the world has been placed into a constant rhetorical conversation.  With the proper purpose and means of persuasion, as exists in the Middle East, this collective conversation can become a cry for freedom, and spread to an audience ripe for revolution.

"This I Believe" Podcast

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiWlEF2Lg3M