Response to autobiographical essays

I found it interesting that the only essay in which the author's initial feelings and emotions were fundamentally altered later in life was in "Surviving the Mustard Lid Day's." In this article, the author was upset over her abandoned mother and deceased father, struggling to find her way in the world while constantly arguing with her grandparents, who were raising her. She was always at odds with grandparents. Later, she came to understand the impact her grandparents had on her development. They nurtured her, raised her, and attempted to motive her, often in vain, to become a happy person. The moral of the story was that her grandparents made her who she is today and she would not be the person she is today without their encouragement and support. Enormously different perspective from her initial feelings and emotions.

In the remaining three articles there was not this dramatic modification in feeling or emotion. For example, in "A Few Words About Breasts," the author during and after adolescence still pitied her lack of breast size. The author in "The Androgynous Male," felt androgyny was a great attribute at the beginning, middle, and end of his article. And in "Minivan Motoring," the author always felt that "freedom" from riding old-school and run-down automobiles, like his minivan he was describing at the beginning of the article. There was no change from previous perception.

I feel that in an autobiographical narrative, this unpredictable thesis/revelation makes for great writing. In most cases, as a reader, I expected some sort of transformation from the author, and in most cases, I didn't get it. Whether the author later changes his initial perceptions or not, the element of surprise is still there as long as the writer does not make the revelation/conclusion obvious to the reader, as the authors in "A Few Words About Breasts," and "Minivan Motoring" did.

Research Topic

Was Richard Nixon a good president despite the Watergate Scandal?

-reduced tension between the U.S and U.S.S.R.
-opened dialogue with China
-ended the draft and brought U.S troops home from the Vietnam War
-reduced the number of nuclear weapons between U.S and U.S.S.R
-environmentalist
-cutback funding on health care, education, and social programs for the poor
-clandestinely bombed communists in Cambodia
-high inflation, unemployment rate, and oil prices
-supported a coup in Chile which brought General Augusto Pinochet, a ruthless dicatator, to power

Informal fallacy article

My informal fallacy article, posted below, is an editorial article published in the Washington Post on March 6, 2009. Charles Krauthammer is an eminent writer in the post and has written about politics for many years. The article in itself is not a rhetorical fallacy, however he writes, in his opinion, what seems to be a rhetorical fallacy on the part of Barack Obama. The attended audience are the readers of the Washington Post or those interested in politics and the world. The article touches on pathos because the state of the economy should be a vital concern among all americans and the new administration's actions (or lack of) is something we will take earnestly. Also, there is an appeal to logos when Krauthammer mentions Barack Obama's motivation to bring a better, more refined health care system and a reformation of energy and education. And finally, the purpose of the article was to more or less criticize Obama for telling the American people that universal health care, less of a reliance on foriegn oil, and easier access to college for students is the necessary cure for the financial crisis, something the the author views as a non-sequitur.

Most consider the causes of the financial causes, as Krauthammer alludes to in his article, to a lack of government regulations, greedy CEO's, and irresponsible lending and buying. And the new administration certainly agrees with the list. However, they seemingly only mention the necessity of education, energy, and heath-care reform--three items unrelated to the the cause of the financial debacle. According to the author, it appears that whenever talk occurs about repairing the markets, these are the only items conversed with the American public, causing many to worry about the future of the U.S economy. It is a non-sequitur, according to Krauthammer. The cures offered by the administration to rectify the financial crisis "do not follow" with the causes that got is in the mess in the first place. This rhetorical fallacy, although may certainly help the many Americans without health-care, will not however, abate the high unemployement rate until genuine actions are taken to address the financial crisis.

Informal fallacy article

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March 06, 2009

Deception at Core of Obama Plans

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.

All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:

"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Ideas Critique

James M. Hulbert in "What do we produce in the knowledge factory and for whom? A Review Essay of The Knowledge. . ." supports Mark Edmundson's main point in his article, "On the Uses of a Liberal Education." They both view that American colleges have been corrupted by our culture. However James Hulbert goes a step further by blatantly criticizing corporations for creating this consumer-driven society which has now allegedly pervaded the educational realm. On the other hand, Edmundson is willing to admit his fallacies as a professor for succumbing to the consumerism of college and places the blame on several sources, parents and professors included.

Both professors have reached the conclusion that a majority of college students are only seeking to obtain their degrees in order to kick off their careers without earnestly attempting to become an expert in their respective field. Their overall thesis is mostly true. Students are for the most part perversely quiet in the classroom, shy about going to professor's office hours, and they view eccentricity as abhorrent. However, for the sake of arguing against their thesis, Hulbert's adamant anti-corporation feelings revealed in the article could be, potentially to some at least, the precise problem of why students feel it unneccessary to speak up in class, not our consumerist society. If a student does not want to be ridiculed in front of an auditorium sized class, it may just be best to keep his/her mouth shut.

Also, the two authors provide no realistic solution to what they regard as an urgent problem in our colleges today. Closing down fraternities, clubs, and sports teams will not go too well for most people concerned in college affairs and modifying universities so that students will have no choices choosing classing, etc will also not fair well for the customer (student) who is paying the university a more than generous amount of tuition.

Rhetorical Critique

Although Mark Edmundson's article in "On the Uses of a Liberal Education" possesses a meritorious theme and deserves much attention, his argument is not without dispute. For one thing, he seems to ignore the fact the professors today are inexorably opposed to other opinions. This can partly explain why students are often afraid to speak up in class. If a professor is going to rebuke students in front of their peers, then why should they even have the nerve to speak their mind? It's one thing to challenge students and correct them when they are wrong, but there's a threshold, and professor's often cross it too much.

There are a few other points worthy of mention. Edmundson articulates in his article that students are too complacent, not willing to deviate from the norm, and are not pursuing a higher degree of knowledge. But isn't competition to get into colleges today a little more so than, say, forty years ago? Are students not expected to be brighter and smarter than when their parents went to college? Edmundson gets caught up in our consumer driven society and the effects it has played on college students but neglects to mention that education and intelligence in our college community has been unparalleled by any other generation. Where does this fit into the picture and how does it relate with his argument?

My final critique of his article is that he does not propose any solutions to our consumer, complacent college community. He mentions the word "solutions" in the very last page of his incessantly long article, but offers no true solutions, only criticizing our capitalist country, as most college professors have a tendency to do. Then in the second to last paragraph of the article he proposes closing down fraternities and banishing sports and clubs, as if this is a realistic response to what has allegedly become a consumer driven college community.

Summary of "On the Uses of Liberal Education"

Mark Edmundson in "On the Uses of a Liberal Education," examines college student's lack of intellectual curiosity and relates this to the consumer-driven society we live in. The multiple choices students have today in college have made the university a facile learning environment, resulting in complacent students. For example, he ridicules the fact that students have the ability to withdraw from classes with a month left in the semester and professors are making their classes interesting rather than languid, as he puts it, in order to meet the needs of the students. Pop culture has created a perfect, utopian world vision for students, who are now so concerned with their consummate personalities they lack the courage to challenge conventional thought, afraid of being debunked.

Along the same lines, passion has been nonexistent in the classroom, according to Edmundson. Students have been too focused on conforming to society--a society which dissuades eccentricity and imperfectness. This devoid of passion has led to the end of striving for genius, leading to uneducated and uncurious individuals. However, Edmundson notes that the problem does not just lie with the students but with the professors as well. Good professor evaluations, which are a criteria of whether professors recieve tenure or not, often require students to be "interested" in the class, forcing professors to, again, satisy the students rather than challenge them.