TOW #7: Pond Scum: Henry David Thoreau's Moral Myopia

Walden Pond is one of the best known works of American Literature. The book, written by celebrated author Henry David Thoreau, focuses on the benefits of embracing wilderness, solitude and simplicity. It is seen as a keystone in the mythos of America's "Great Outdoors" and is a common read for many high school students. However, as Kathryn Shulz--writer for the New Yorker and Pew Research Journalism laureate--points out, Thoreau's Walden Pond might not have been as idyllic as the American nature lover might think. In "Pond Scum" Kathryn Schulz explores Thoreau's most famous work, as well as opinions of his contemporaries, to reveal the darker side of Thoreau. Using his own quotes as well as those of his friends, Schulz argues that Thoreau was not a champion of nature and living the simple life but rather an egotistical, narcissistic, self absorbed nihilist. Schulz's criticism is intended to be read for the modern American who is familiar with the works of Thoreau, but not necessarily educated in Thoreau's personal life or the deeper implications of his works. Due to this, Schulz juxtaposes Thoreau's reality to that which he fabricates in Walden Pond to discredit the idea that he is a paragon of simplicity and environmental virtue. For example, in order to paint Thoreau as a pompous and condescending hypocrite, she fleshes out all of his exacting standards of living without luxuries only to point out how some of his descriptions in Walden Pond might have been slightly blurred. She says "In reality, Walden Pond in 1845 was scarcely more off the grid, relative to contemporaneous society, than Prospect Park is today. The commuter train to Boston ran along its southwest side; in summer the place swarmed with picnickers and swimmers, while in winter it was frequented by ice cutters and skaters. He also fails to mention weekly visits from his mother and sisters (who brought along more undocumented food) and downplays the fact that he routinely hosted other guests as well—sometimes as many as thirty at a time. This is the situation Thoreau summed up by saying, 'For the most part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. . . . At night there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door, more than if I were the first or last man.'" By juxtaposing Thoreau's reality with his impossible fabricated realities, Schulz shows not only how the values that Thoreau preached so pompously to his "lessers" were unrealistic and impossible to obtain, but also that Thoreau could not keep to the morals which he himself fabricated. Through this juxtaposition, Schulz shows that Thoreau was not a god but rather a charlatan and a hypocrite.

TOW #6: We count pitches to save arms, It;s time to track hits to save lives.

High school football is an American institution. Where quarterbacks are lauded as high school heroes, and Friday nights are dominated by high school showdowns for many a Middle American town, football reigns supreme in the American high school hierarchy. That being said, as of late this fall tradition has come under fire for its blatant disregard for the safety of its players as traumatic brain injuries become more and more common on the football scene. Senior sports writer for TIME Magazine Sean Gregory takes on this topic as he argues for the implementation of preventative measures that would in theory reduce the devastating brain injuries that mar the face of American football. In his op-ed, Gregory argues that much like the pitch counting in baseball to preserve the pitcher's arm, football should implement "hit counting" where the number of hits to the head of a player are counted in order to potentially prevent brain injury. As he argues to his audience of football watching Americans that it is necessary for these precautions to be implemented, he effectively uses statistics and comparisons to prove his point. When speaking on the magnitude of head injuries amongst football players, he says "Last month, the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University said 87 of 91 brains of deceased NFL players showed signs of CTE, a devastating neurological disease believed to result from blows to the head" (para 10). Through this statistic and others throughout the text, Gregory appeals to the reader's sense of logos by supporting his assertion that traumatic brain injury in football is a large problem with facts from credible sources. He also compares football hit counts to baseball pitch counts, showing how it is nonsensical that football does not count hits when baseball pitches are counted--and pitch counts protect arms not lives. This comparison once again appeals to logos and shows to the reader that it is obvious and logical for a hit count system to be implemented in high school and professional level football.

TOW #5: Visual Text

In this visual text, a U.S. propaganda poster from World War One, one can see the extremely patriotic and sometimes far reaching nature of wartime propaganda in the early twentieth century. The poster, not necessarily authored but instead published by the United States Treasury Department, shows its bias in authorship through its creation by a government agency for government motivations. The poster was created in 1918 as the United States entered the First World War. Like any country in a time of war, the United States was in need of support from all of its citizens, men and women alike, and in this case was in need of monetary support. Monetary support in this poster would appear to come in the form of War Savings Stamps, stamps marketed to the common American that supported the military and that could be transferred into war bonds. This advert targets women of the United States as its audience, and its purpose is to convince women to buy war bonds by means of showing how ordinary women could "save" their country by doing so. In order to do this, the poster ineffectively employs a comparison of Joan of Arc to average American women in a way that seems forced and unintentionally comical. The text on the poster reads "Joan of Arc saved France--Women of America save your country--Buy War Savings Stamps" and has a picture of a woman in armor who is assumedly Joan of Arc. The comparison is lack luster and stretched at best, comparing two completely unrelated things under the pretext that they both involve women and war. The image Joan of Arc as a strong female war figure and comparison of her to every day Americans attempts to invoke feelings of female patriotism, but it falls flat as Joan of Arc is an outmoded and French, not American, example of female empowerment. In addition to the out of touch use of Joan of Arc, the fact that the image is used to show how women could be similar to her by buying stamps is even more outrageous. Joan of Arc "saved" her country through her religious fervor and questionable military knowledge (she was fourteen, she couldn't know much) while women of American can "save" (according to the poster) their country by buying stamps. The fact that America was not in need of saving at the time of this poster (America was not under attack during WWI) as well as the fact that stamps could not save America in general, shows that this poster is overreaching in its abilities and comically bombastic in its claims, and thus ineffective in its use of rhetoric to serve its purpose.

TOW #4: IRB "Please Kill Me"

Please Kill Me: An Oral History of Punk, is exactly as its name would imply. It is an oral history, written through alternating interviews with first hand witnesses of the punk movement, that captures the crazed, strung out, nihilistic conundrum of the 1970s punk movement. The book, written by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, gains credibility through the fact that its central narratives are told by the narrative's subject's themselves, as interviewed by McNeil and McCain, who are also first hand participants of the movement as writers for Punk and Spin magazines. The book begins by following the eclectic projects of Andy Warhol in the late 1960s, as he launched the first wave of avant garde counter culture with Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground. The book then proceeds to follow various famous (and infamous) punk figures such as Iggy Pop, Jim Morrison and the Ramones from Hippy and Beatnik culture to the advent of punk, showing the reader the unbelievable dysfunctionality that enabled punk to gain its iconic insanity.
The book, written with a sense of 20-20 hindsight by those who were making extremely bad decisions in their punk youth, is written for those who were involved in the time period as well as the new youths whose vices are relatively mild compared to those of the punk era. With this audience in mind, the authors intend to show to the reader that this defining era in pop culture was born out of dissidence, chaos, and no real unifying movement. The authors prove this through their style of using juxtaposed polarizing opinions of those they have interviewed to show how there was no order during the time. For example, when speaking on the unhinged lifestyle of Doors frontman Jim Morrison, some acquaintances of had extremely opposing opinions on the famed musician. Ray Manzarek, Doors keyboardist fondly said "Jim was a shaman" (McNeil McCain 31), while (juxtaposed directly below Manzarek's opinion) record executive Danny Fields said "Jim Morrison was a callous asshole, an abusive, mean person" (McNeil McCain 31). Through this inclusion and juxtaposition of a spectrum of views on the punk era, the authors reveal how the punk movement was less of a movement and more of a gathering of extremely different groups with one common love of chaos. Thus, the authors effectively prove their purpose that the punk era was extremely chaotic and disconnected.