Cold and Detached

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood begins with a detached and gloomy description of the isolated town of Holocomb, Kansas. He describes it as a town "out there" and "simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center" (pg. 3.), as he makes the reader suspicious of what could happen in the cold novel. While you read the first few pages, describing the town, the town appears as lonely or unsociable but calm and unperturbed. Capote briefly juxtaposes the remote and peaceful town he shows with the sudden announcement of the murder of six people. As I read the first fifteen pages or so, I could see that the author is building up suspense for what is going to happen, a homicide, as the reader familiarizes with the town and the characters.

Once the calm and empty illustration of the town is disrupted, Capote shifts right away to the characterization of Herbert Clutter, a respected member of the community of Holocomb. The author continues to use a detached tone but with a foreboding aspect. As a reader, you expect that the murder will happen any moment. I got suspicious about him when Capote describes his anger and thought that the armed hunters would lead somehow to the killing, because the cold and suspensive tone. While the tone is like that for the most part, the author occasionally uses quotations where he shows Holocomb's "prairie twang" or their colloquial language. The Clutter parents see one of their daughters as a "real Southern belle" (pg. 8) and Nancy, that daughter, wanted to go to a special event that all her friends were going to. The author's specific description with a personal touch contrasts from the distant introduction of the town. Capote makes it seem first like just a typical environment where life is dull, but as he starts to get into the Clutter family, the reader gets the feeling that they're good, normal people, perhaps, like you (the reader) are. The way the author gets increasingly into detail with the characters can suggest it will follow the structure of many crime novels or TV episodes, or that these follow Capote's structure, as he gets into the homicide. I remember that Agatha Christie's And The There Were None started with a detached mood, a kept a cold tone all through the book, and used a similar structure as Capote. She began with a character, describing him or her in general, and then she got into specifics of their life, culminating in their disappearance. Looking at the next couple of pages of In Cold Blood, I can see that Capote will alternate stories between characters, just like Christie.
So far, reading this book feels like reading a murder novel but with a deeper literary aspect to it. I've just read the first fifteen pages so honestly I haven't been able to analyze it very deeply, so that's a question I want to keep in mind in my future reading: Where is Capote going with the crime stories?

Vocabulary

·      Haphazard: lacking organization

·      Dire: extremely serious or urgent, dangerous

·      Gaunt: skinny, looking exhausted

·      Rawhide: leather

·      Postmistress: woman in charge of a post office

·      Meager: lacking quantity or quality, thin

·      Chancy: subject to unpredictable changes

·      Scuttling: hurrying

·      Impinge: have a negative effect, intrude

·      Keening: making a wailing sound in grief

·      Seldom: rarely

·      Hued: colored (hue: shade of a color)

"I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys" -George Orwell

In George Orwell's essay, "Shooting an Elephant," he uses a metaphor to show his views on British imperialism. The autobiographical account literally shows how he killed an elephant because he felt that he had to, but beyond the facts he is explaining the nature of imperialism and being persuasive about it. If you read his essay at first you might think that it's just a story about his visit to Burma, but if you look deeper, you'll see that he uses rhetoric and fallacies to construct a point about the political and social situation of that time.

Orwell begins his essay with a bad example fallacy. He uses hyperbole and makes observations on Asia based on the few descriptions he gives or his personal thoughts. While there could be a lot of people in where he was, they surely didn't represent Burma as a whole or the nature of the British Empire. The author uses hasty generalizations when describing some of them, both literally and in the rhetorical sense. He doesn't do it because he hates a specific group of people based on a few he met, but because he's trying to show the reader his environment. Some yellow-faced Asian most likely did insult him, but he felt like the whole race was against him, a British police officer. Same with the Buddhist priests--the way he describes them, in a hasty generalization or based on merely his personal observation, shows that the British viewed an overly simplified situation. Because of his mental fallacy, or perceiving things in a way that lacked a connection between the evidence and conclusion, Orwell felt that he was a puppet of the empire and like "every Englishman in the East," he had to suffer in silence. He says, "Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty." His fallacies are certainly not to amaze the reader with the huge number of Asians or overly simplified descriptions, but rather to show how imperialism affected people's mind and perception. Through his essay, George Orwell describes the way imperialism affects the logical way of thinking.

After having described the way he lived in Burma, Orwell continues to tell about the event, killing an elephant, that allowed him to understand the essence of imperialism. He continues to make generalization about his surroundings as he describes how he felt pressured by the natives to shoot an elephant that had gone crazy. While he uses a few literal fallacies, Orwell's essay has a disconnect between the proof and the conclusion in the situation. He walked by a field with a gun, because he felt it was appropriate and he perceived that the Burmese wanted him to kill the animal, so he did. He was the authority, and was armed, so he could've done anything he wanted, but the effects of "tyranny" made unable to oppose to pressure. The proof in the situation would be that there was a crazy elephant and a lot of natives around, and the conclusion that you had to kill it, but the connection between them is flawed, he didn't have to kill it because of the pressure. Orwell writes, "I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle." It's a fallacy beyond just the writing. He shows that imperialism and despotism got into people's minds and made them act illogically. The division between the colonizers and the colonized made people act in the way the stereotype said they should, sort of like a false dilemma.

The Disastrous Effects

We often think of Winston Churchill as the British hero that saved Europe from the Nazis and was a great ally to America, but most people don't know about his imperialist side. In Churchill's speech "Our Duty in India," he uses fallacies to build up the belief that Britain couldn't allow India to become independent and that the Conservative Party should unite for that cause.
Churchill begins his speech by building an idea with a wrong ending fallacy. He wants to make his audience feel attacked by the Socialist Party and blame someone for the situation, so he states that as the plans of the Conservative Party are being stopped, the Socialists will take advantage of them to keep them out of the issue of India. Churchill is using the slippery slope fallacy as he shows one possible solution as if it was what was actually happening. As he antagonizes the Socialists, Churchill proceeds to explain his ideas about India.
According to Churchill, everyone would agree that allowing India to become independent would be self-destructive and absurd for everyone, so they shouldn't do it. Apart from being a hasty generalization, his proof doesn't lead to the conclusion, so it's also a wrong ending fallacy. Churchill then continues to explain how everything would go wrong if British imperialism ended.
Churchill says, "The princes, the Europenas, the Moslems, the Depressed classes, the Anglo-Indians--none of them know what to do nor where to turn in the face of their apparent desertion by Great Britain. Can you wander that they try in desperation to make what terms are possible with the triumphant Brahmin oligarchy?" He uses the straw man fallacy to make people believe that one of the many paths India could follow once independent would be destructive and horrible for everyone. He also wrongly assumes that no one in India would know how govern the colonies. Not even Gandhi, who, if you read his latest declarations, cannot stop fighting, would be able to govern India. That statement tries to make people skeptical about what would happen if India became independent using a hasty generalization, as Churchill only uses a very general example to condemn the Indian leader. Churchill goes back to victimizing the Conservative Party, suffering under the attack of the Socialists. He uses post hoc ergo propter hoc by assuming that as the Party is suffering because of the Socialists, it must be the fault of something that preceded it.

The beginning of Winston Churchill's speech used different types of fallacies but as he further explains his ideas, he bases most of what he says in a slippery slope fallacy. Churchill wants to keep the British Empire ruling the world and according to him, if it wasn't like that, places like India would have chaos. He attacks the idea of a federal system saying that it would collapse in India because every region or religion would try to seize power. He also says that the untouchables would suffer because of the authoritarian and evil-minded (in a reductio ad absurdum way) Brahmin rule. The problem is that those things would not happen but could happen. In his slippery slope fallacy that puts together all elements of his speech, Churchill choses the worst case scenario for India's independence, that could happen, and makes it seem like the only possible outcome. He literally says that all services in India would collapse in the case of British withdrawal. Although it's true that defense could collapse, hygiene deteriorate and many things get messy, it is not as simple as "independence equals disaster."

Set to make Indian independence look like a huge disaster and wrong decision, Winton Churchill uses rhetorics and a lot of fallacies to convince his audience that they needed to support British imperialism. Churchill oversimplifies the situation and makes assumptions that disconnect his proofs from his conclusions. Although his speech could sound like strong and convincing for some people, if you look closely to what he says you will notice that his imperialist argument is not logical.

Oh God

In 1931, BBC invited Gandhi to Kingsley Hall for the sole purpose of recording his point of view. Although the recorders wanted him to speak about politics, Gandhi refused and decided to give a speech on God and what he believed about him. He chose to donate all royalties to an association in India. It can certainly be a touching speech, where Gandhi explains that a universal force rules us benevolently, but if you look closely at what he says, he's building up an idea without real proof to support it. Gandhi admits both that there is no reason in his argument and that he doesn't fully believe in God. He constructed his speech all on fallacies to build a spiritual argument that has no proof. I'm not sure whether he wanted to earn royalties, popularity or recognition, but his ideas are fallacious and his conclusion artificial.

Gandhi begins his speech with a contradictory statement. It's not part of Heinrichs' fallacies, but there's a conflict between what he says, and he uses a proof that doesn't support the conclusion. He says, "There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything, I feel it though I do not see it." The conclusion is that there is a power, but what he puts as a proof disproves it. If he can't see it, it's surely not pervading everything, not his eyes at least. After talking about the mysterious power, and saying that it can be reasoned to an extent, which he contradicts later, Gandhi switches his topic to God. In a false comparison, Gandhi assumes that the force and God are the same. Once he has stated that God's rules are everywhere, he goes on to observe why we don't see them.

He mentions that some poor villagers in India didn't know who ruled their town but said that God ruled it. If God's rules are everywhere, and they know God rules them, then they did know who "rules" their town. That pathos-oriented anecdote about the villagers has a disconnect between the proof and conclusion. Gandhi says that, just as supposedly they didn't know who ruled them, he didn't know who rules him, although he said it is God. He admits to feel the orderliness of the universe and the existence of a universal law, falsely comparing himself to the ignorant villagers. Then, in a hasty generalization, he affirms that "it" cannot be a blind law because blind laws never work. A typical hasty generalization offers too few examples that prove the conclusion, he offers none. Gandhi mentions that Sir J. C. Bose proved that even matter is life, distracting the audience from anything that's relevant to what he just said. He uses a red herring also to be pathetic, as he's mentioning an important Bengali. Gandhi ends that paragraph saying that since he doesn't know much about the law-giver, he cannot deny his law, which is clearly an ignorance as proof fallacy.

Apparently no king ruled Mysore (where he talked to the poor villagers) from this palace

Gandhi continues to talk about his denial of the certainly existent power, as he jumps into a series of consecutive fallacies. "Since nothing else that I see merely through the senses can or will persist, He alone is," says Gandhi in a fallacy of ignorance. Then he assures that He can be either malevolent or benevolent, and that he's certainly the last. It is a false dilemma because, as far as we know, God could be kind of good or both good and bad. He says that God is benevolent because he persists in the middle of life and death, truth and untruth and light and darkness. Therefore, says Gandhi, God is life, truth, light, live and the supreme Good. He achieves that conclusion by a wrong ending fallacy. Gandhi states a lot things as if they were facts or truths about life. He says that, "God to be God must rule the heart and transform it," and that he must express himself in definite realizations beyond our five senses. These facts he states use the wrong ending fallacy, again, because there is no connection between the proof and the conclusion. It is partly a tautology as well because for God to be God he must do what people often think of as God. 

Gandhi ends his speech by saying that since prophets have felt God in realizations beyond their senses, God exists. He bases his argument in saying that what we feel beyond our senses is infallible, which uses no proof for his conclusion. Then he uses a bad example, as he says that as prophets have felt God, he is real. What a few prophets think is not the truth about the world or representative about what everyone thinks. It is also a tautology as prophets, by definition people who proclaim the will of God, obviously "feel" God. Gandhi concludes his speech saying that, "Faith transcends reason." Just like reason can't explain God, his logic couldn't either. The whole speech is based on contradictions and presumed facts. There is clearly a disconnection between the evidence and conclusions of his arguments, making his explanation of God completely fallacious. 

How We Actually Use Rhetorics

My dad saw me reading Thank You for Arguing this weekend and he asked me what it was about. I told him that it was about rhetorics and that I was reading it for my AP Lang class. When he heard rhetorics, he told me that it's something he uses a lot for his job. I did know rhetorics was important and that we all used in everyday life, but I actually hadn't pictured that in my mind. So far I've only noticed my use of persuasion in MUN or school elections, but as my dad told me about his job, it made more sense for me that rhetoric is actually very useful. My dad told me about different things he does to form arguments. He told me that when he's trying to persuade someone into doing something new, he likes to mention comparable events int eh past as it gets to people's minds right away. It can relate it directly to Heinrich's "The 'That Depends' Filter" and the "Comparable Experience." The author explains them for the reader to know how to find them and get the persuader's flaws, but if you do these successfully they can help a lot. As people don't know what will happen in the future, the only way to understand what to do is to look at the past. If you find the right experience it can be a very good way for someone to start liking an idea. My dad gave me an example in which he compared Colombia to another country. He told me that it can help for some of his arguments if the crowd likes international things, but that if it's a patriotic audience, you should never use such comparisons. I found chapters sixteen and seventeen of  Thank You for Arguing very interesting and relatable to daily life.

The Green Celebration

After introducing the reader to the seven fallacies he identifies, Heinrichs starts to explain what problems in logic actually mean and the problems that can happen in rhetoric as a whole. Fallacies can be bad for persuasion as their proofs don't connect with their conclusions, but if you achieve your goal of persuasion, perhaps because no one noticed the fallacies, can be good. The author points out that in rhetoric there is no right or wrong, or good or bad, there are choices, some better than others. Heinrichs says that you can have flaws in your arguments but that you can never argue the inarguable. He identifies seven out-of-bound areas of persuasion: using the wrong tense, being inflexible, humiliation, innuendo, threats, nasty language and utter stupidity. Arguments don't have to be perfect as most of the time people simply will not notice. Two years ago, during the Colombian presidential campaigns, many people had become fanatics of Antanas Mockus, but I believe that stepping into the out-of-bounds area in one of the most important speeches he made, deterred his image a lot.

I had liked Mockus so far, even though I didn't have a really strong opinion about the elections, since his arguments showed that he was serious and wise. How I perceived it was that he was not a typical politician as he did things for ideas and not power and he would be a president who made intelligent decisions. In May 30th, 2012 his defeat/victory(?) speech made me think that he was nuts and all his movement just crazy and fanatic. First, Mockus gave his whole speech in present and past tense. Unless he was blaming or talking about values, he should have used the future tense as, I assume, he wanted to talk about what should be done. The whole mood of his speech or ceremony was inconsistent with the situation. As the Al Jazeera reporter says on the video (below) that there was disappointment, all I could see and hear was people excited and proud. They could have chosen a side, either victory or defeat, to make something out of it, but his speech was just ambiguous. Mockus talked about the new nationality that his movement had started and that he did not think the ending justifies the means. His ideas were well-thought and could have been very persuasive had he phrased them some other way. Instead of talking about what should be done or what he would do to win the elections, Mockus talked about random unpersuasive things.

The second mistake he made was making an absurd celebration. Jaime Bayly made a video (below) commenting on Mockus' autogoles or self defeats, and he focused a lot on this speech. I remember watching the speech on TV and thinking that the whole green scene along his beard made it look like a St. Patricks celebration, but the I realized I was wrong as I heard them yelling, "Tu vida es sagrada."It was actually a hippie religious sect. He stepped into the "utter stupidity" out-of-bounds zone as he joined his followers in shouting phrases like "Si se puede," "Si se pudo"(really, what?), "Que no todo vale,""Su conciencia vale mas que un tamal," and many others. In rhetorics there is usually no right or wrong, especially in politics where it's good if it gets you votes, but when you break the few rules of rhetorics, it is catastrophic.

The Al Jazeera report on the elections shows the results neutrally, while you hear Mockus' celebration. 

Jaime Bayly mocks Mockus' speech in this video (it's in Spanish but you can put English subtitles).

Is it a thing?

Rhetorics can abstract techniques of persuasion that you hint or encounter through communication, but it can also be the dull formal logic Greeks used to run their civilization. Chapter thirteen of Thank You for Arguing started boring and unexciting, as the author introduced what he accurately describes as a "torturous device," syllogisms, but as he deepened the explanation of the rhetorical device, I started finding it more interesting and relatable to actual life. No one actually uses rhetorics in daily life to prove that Socrates is mortal, we're all well aware that he's dead, but that kind of simple deductions and inductions are used a lot for persuading people.

As I read the chapter, especially the part about premises, I thought about the unsuccessful campaigns adults do to prevent teenagers from drinking. They have very good intentions, the most reasonable conclusions and beliefs, as well as great examples to prove their points, but they lack a premise or a commonplace that they can share with teenagers. It starts very simple, if you put anti-alcohol campaigns in a syllogism, it would probably go like this:

Drinking is bad for everyone. 

You want to take care of yourself.

Therefore, you shouldn't drink.

It sounds reasonable but the commonplace it uses often doesn't work with teenagers. As part of deductive logic, it uses a supposed fact to reach a rational solution. Nevertheless, this supposed fact does not get into many teens' minds. They might not be sure they want the best for themselves and if they do, they have a very blurry idea of getting that. Most of these campaigns go ahead and use enthymemes, and skip obvious commonplaces. The resulting syllogism is also very simple but it still doesn't work:

Drinking is bad for everyone.

Therefore, you shouldn't drink.

Probably the age difference between teens and those that campaign against alcohol makes it difficult to form a premise the works for many ages. Perhaps more pathos, getting to teenagers' feelings so that they decide to stop drinking, might work better because logos without logic doesn't work a lot. Even though syllogism were as boring as the author of the book indicated, if you actually analyze rhetorics with that structure you can see that a simple lack of consensus in a premise can make persuasion unsuccessful. 

__________

Vocabulary:

• Syllogism: Form of reasoning used to reach a conclusion. As part of formal logic it's a very technical way to move someone to a thought. 
• Enthymeme: Basically a syllogism that doesn't include obvious things like that Socrates is a man. It uses commonplaces, or things in people's minds, to build conclusions upon them. 
• Deductive logic: Rhetorics that use commonplaces or premises to reach a conclusion, usually about beliefs or values. 
• Examples: Proof from cases of real life. It is used in deductive logic to lead to a conclusion. 
• Premise: Part of deductive logic, something that people know or believe. 
• Inductive logic: (Opposite of deductive logic). It uses examples and specific points to move towards a general idea or belief. Uses circumstances to form ideas. 
• Paradigm: means a typical or perfect example of something. A"set of linguistic items that form mutually exclusive choices in particular syntactic roles" in my computer's dictionary. It's basically what you use for examples in deductive logic. 

Rhetorics All Over

Commonplace
Perhaps the simplest, most successful and most seen commonplace in Colombians' lives is the constant use of the word "peace." There has not been peace in Colombia pretty much since it has humans living on it and some televised negotiations in Cuba or Norway won't do anything about it. They might be very successful in ending a war between the government and a specific terrorist or guerrilla organization, but peace is irrelevant. Heinrichs describes commonplaces as terms people can use to get ideas into others' minds. They make you relate an argument to a basic idea you're familiar with, even though they don't have anything correlation. The proceso de paz or peace process is just a commonplace-wording for dissolving a group if it even happens. The government and FARC are negotiation to see if they stop shooting each other and if FARC transforms into some political body. Unfortunately, neither of them has the superpower of creating peace. They do, however, have the power to get into people's minds. Colombia is all optimistic about the upcoming peace. It helps the government's image, people's confidence and the idea that Colombia is doing so great. Having mentioned "optimistic," political figures use this commonplace to show everyone that something good is happening, although they might not know what that thing is. The media and politicians use this commonplace to convince people that things are better. If an average Colombian read that FARC and the government were going to meet to discuss the possibility of further negotiation to see if by some chance they agree in a solution out of this conflict, the news wouldn't be as popular. I personally am optimistic about the dialogues with FARC and think that using the word "peace" might help get into people's brains for good.

If you search for the word "peace" at this page, you get thirty-nine matches.

Term Changing

Apple went pretty much straight forward with this one. The company was visionary and saw that computers were becoming a popular thing (this ad was released in 1998). To grow big, they needed to appeal to the consuming crowds, not the geeky computer programmers. So they went ahead and said it in the ad. Apple wanted to change their image from being just another complex machine to the trendy and simple tool everyone wants (including me). Heinrichs' shows term changing as, "Don't accept the terms your opponent uses. Insert your own." Apple does that almost exactly. They wanted to create a new reputation so they literally inserted a new one. 

Redefinition

I owe redefinition my life. While I wasn't brutally bullied in middle school, I did have rivalries with a lot of people and didn't integrate quite well with my grade. I certainly wasn't popular, and even though I was sort of a loser, people envied my academic success. A lot of kids responded to their jealousy and immatureness using a commonplace. "Why are you such a nerd?" they would say. Oh no! They're calling me "nerd," a huge insult with a terrible connotation. They'd expect most people to respond to the commonplace insult like that, and even though I did for a while, my brain was functional enough to realize I could redefine that term when being part of dumb preteen face-offs. "I'm a nerd because my parents raised me this way and because I can be one. You're futureless idiot with no skill at all. You're not a nerd because you can't be one," became my last resource argument for middle school survival. Heinrichs defines redefinition as using what your opponents call you in your favor. In this case I could have gone with definition jujitsu and accepted the bad connotation for nerd, but I attempted to make a new one. Looking back it was pointless to insult some people that way, but for my rhetorical purposes of that time, crushing their arguments and self-esteem, I was very successful. I've learned that accepting others critiques about you (or insults) is just a step to get to know yourself and destroy them better.

Definition Jujitsu

I don't think "Colombia es pasión" or the new toucan Colombia logo (in the marketing way) have been very successful to deal with the horrible reputation the country has basically everywhere, but the catch phrase you often see in Colombian airports (shown below) has indeed helped. While uninformative advertisings like saying that Colombia is passion or using a well-designed colorful bird for the brand don't mean anything to a tourist arriving here or some random European being targeted by the Colombian country brand, the image below shows a marketing strategy with rhetorical tools behind it. The motto acknowledges what people outside Colombia think, that it's dangerous and many people get kidnapped, so it accepts it and turns it into a positive thing. Through this definition jujitsu, people see that their term of Colombia, a dangerous place, is actually different. Its kind of amusing so it catches people's attention, but since it uses rhetorics, the ad achieves much more than abstract mottos about passion or biodiversity.

Definition Judo

As the presidential elections are closer, my grandmother gets passionate about her hatred for socialism. After living in the US for most of her life, she has become very interested in American politics and even excited to vote against Obama. I went to visit her today because she is leaving to Florida for a couple of weeks, to visit friends and family, but mostly to submit her Republican ballot in the good old fashioned way. My father tried to convince her that Obama was not that bad, and that things like health and welfare needed to be improved to prevent the US from decaying. After having heard the phrases (commonplaces) public good, universal health and social improvement, my grandmother attacked back with civil liberties, communist (which can have a horrible connotation for many crowds), terrorism and public debt. While she does point out things that she thinks Romney will do to help the country, during this discussion she just used commonplaces that contrasted to my dad's and made Obama sound like an awful tax collector. Like I see when my grandmother talks about the elections, politics has a lot of definition judo, where each party takes the other's terms and contrasts them.