Pathological Liars

Lying as Heinrichs says, "isn't just wrong, it's unpersuasive" (pg. 40). I definitely agree with the author, as even good lies never last, but I'm sure that some lies, before they do fail, are persuasive and make everyone fall like idiots. The small successful part of lying uses rhetorics and gets people to believe the most absurd things.

Politics, as on of the places where rhetorics happens the most, is where manipulating people with emotion and logic means success. As I read Chapter 4 on Thank You for Arguing, I could perfectly what the author says about logos and pathos with the world of elections. Rhetoric could be a way for politicians to reach consensus with people for better, but a lot of times it becomes a tool for demagogues to gain power.

Logos is the tool of rhetoric that uses reason for persuasion. This part of rhetorics uses facts and statistics to form and argument and get people to believe it. All I can say is that 89.485% of statistics are made up. Politicians, in what I've seen, use numbers, often made up, to make people believe things. Voters and political candidates reach consensus by the "truths" that they show us through the media. I've recently started paying attention closer to such things. For example, unemployment under Obama's presidency has decreased substantially, because unemployment does not include people so discouraged that stop looking for a job. He as well has move the country towards a great immigration policy, after being the president that has deported the most people in US history. Colombia, as well, is undergoing huge improvements. After the poverty standards were lowered, poverty decreased!

Politicians all throughout the media bomb people with their logos, but for that to end up being successful, they manipulate the voters' emotions with their pathos in rhetorics. If Obama just said, "I will draft a new law that might eventually make some minor changes in the immigration policy," he wouldn't be as successful. Instead he travels to Florida, the Bronx, Puerto Rico and Arizona and talks about the upcoming transformation to the Latino's lives. Politicians know their people so they always say the perfect thing. Whether it's an emotive speech about fighting Al Qaeda or a thoughtful comment from a world leader, pathos make voters fall for politicians' logos.
Many politicians, for their abusive use of logos and pathos, become pathological liars.

Attack or Negotiate?

When my sister decided to enroll at los Andes instead of going to a university abroad, I only questioned myself on whether I should put an end to her free access to my baked goods. It was a shallow concern, as she was only glad I forced her into a diet. The sister I enjoyed being with and had been able to coexist for a couple of years had, in my eyes, helped me, but it was all actually about her. As she broke my mental agenda in which she would move out at eighteen, my patience was now limited. I expected more but she saw that as a phony or childish complaint. Now that I'm reading Thank You For Arguing by Jay Heinrichs, I can relate my struggle to survive with another human being, with the successes and failures that came along, with rhetoric.

My sister moved up to college where she was free to choose the scheduled she liked. She could've chosen early classes to get them over with but outside a military academy it's normal to want to sleep. Meanwhile my dumb preteen obsession with coffee had messed up my sleep cycle and all I could dream about was getting diagnosed with insomnia to get the appropriate pills. My mom respectfully decided not to laugh at my request and just sent me to bed, where I just stared at the ceiling as our new home theater emitted sound waves, mechanical waves that shook up my eardrum and my sleep. I decided I had to convince somehow my sister to stop watching TV at her new schedule were 11 PM was about the time she would turn to "Gossip Girl."

As Thank You For Arguing's author explained, the least experienced in persuasion often decide to attack. My first strategy was to download and app to my iPod that could control the TV. I went to my bedroom and laid on my bed waiting for my sister to turn the TV on. When I could finally hear, "Last episode Chuck and Blair...Xoxo, Gossip Girl," I opened the app and shut the thing down. My sister turned it on. I turned it off. The thing went on for a while until I lowered the volume, which made her realize it wasn't just shutting off but that someone, most likely her annoying little brother, was controlling it. My parents confiscated my iPod for a week.

My attack failed as I should have wanted to win an argument, not just take her down. Jay Heinrichs suggests first to get to people's emotions, then change their opinions and after that make things happen. My argument against my sister sort of followed what he states and eventually made me see that younger siblings actually can propose something. As a former lawyer, my mom lectured me that just annoying my sister (in other words) was not an argument. If I wanted something I had to convince someone,  not push them towards it. It was the first time I got started to understand how rhetoric works,

I told my parents I wasn't doing well on PE. I was starting to get better at sleeping with noise, but the sleeping quality just wasn't as good. They believed it, mostly because they'll always worry about my inadequacy for sports. Poor me, I'd get rejected for life if I couldn't play soccer. I told them my sister should do sports instead of just watching TV and that did it. We couldn't grow up to be unhealthy bookworms, I'd exercise in PE (sure..) and she'd go to bed earlier to go to the gym. I guess it wasn't that hard to convince her of that. Now I'll never now what happened with Blair and Serena's teenage nightlife in the Big Apple.
I'm definitely not a master of rhetoric but I sure can handle childish disputes like discussing with my sister. Occasions like that made me, gradually, understand that fighting doesn't work. It wasn't only because I couldn't possibly fight, but because there was an option that actually work. For some school elections I was running for, I heard some people say they'd rather vote for someone who would go yell at the HS office until things happened. I'm not a fan of the "Ay Mister!" strategy, so I guess that's why I lost.

The Words for Everyone

Everyone's way of speaking is the perfect and easiest to crush them with satire. Whether it's a man's alternating diction and thus personality, the author's dramatical Shakespearean way of speaking or his Greek grandmother's crappy grammar, David Sedaris focuses all throughout the book on the essence of spoken language, or how our brains spit out who we are. 

"Something for everyone," that's what Dupont, Sedaris' coworker as handymen, meant as he shaped his personality, to please give the best for everyone. For Sedaris, who he spotted as a gay sex maniac, Dupont was a playboy who often shared with him the latest sex adventures with his upper class girlfriend who wanted thrill with a badass black man, a role he adapted to play. With their boss, Uta, the author's coworker was a slave from the nineteenth century, maintaining the language as he sympathized with their common interest in progress. "I don't wanna get me no casah [cancer]... No ma'am, I don't want nothin' preventing' me from achievin' my goals" (pg. 218), "Dat dere bees the exact typo music I listens to at homes" (pg. 218), or "I reckon there will, Miz Uta...I's hoping' I could go to medical school...real soon so maybe I could operate on my mother" (pg. 225) are all examples of Dupont's language as an influence on others. Sedaris is able to show that how we communicate shows who we are, in Dupont's case a psycho.

While some seek to deteriorate their word choice to suit others, Sedaris as a child found his superior diction in Shakespeare's plays. Already a drama aficionado, he decided to change his complete way of speaking in order to "reintroduce" archaic English to Raleigh, NC. "Perchance, fair lady, thou dost think me unduly vexed by the sorrowful state of thine quarters," Sedaris said to his mother. The essay where he talks about this, and overall his general obsession with drama, beneath the humor and self-ridicule, shows that language exhibits our personality. 

Ya Ya, the author's Greek grandmother, complained that her fish "had" a suicide. Sedaris' mom quickly corrected her, but Ya Ya didn't care about what "the girl" said. "The girl go away now," said Ya Ya (pg. 26). In the essay "Get Your Ya-Ya's Out!" Sedaris mocks the cultural clash between his mom and her mother-in-law, examining details ranging from Ya Ya's inability to connect with anyone to her death, showing that diction, again, plays a huge role in satire. The only way the reader gets to know how Ya Ya was, and therefore laugh, is by knowing how she spoke. Although Sedaris' essays have very varied themes, people's vocabulary and phrasing are the base for his ability to crush them with satire. For the readers to be amused by the people he describes, they must know them. It sounds obvious, that words are important for communication, but it's more than that. Each person's diction is what their minds can express, showing how their minds are. By reading Naked, I've understood more the role of diction in rhetoric and communication. 

"Faggoty Faggots"

"I like guys." As Sedaris shows when recalling the time a kid wrote in his (Sedaris') notebook that he like guys, even the most stupid lies and moronic ways of bullying can crush people. "I like guys" is the  most obvious phrase regarding what a homosexual thinks about himself. It's like if Africans wrote down they're black in case they don't remember it. It could get more stereotypical, like an Asian reminding himself that he likes rice. However, there would be no such mockery as Sedaris shows in "I Like Guys," one of his essays, regarding white heterosexual men. "I'm a married man with a savings account," that's no fun. I don't like being a mainstream protester that fights for whatever is in the newspaper, but Sedaris' essay, by his use of truly great satire, shows how minorities can suffer. I know gay marriage and abortion are trendy for debate ever since it became a fun way to win in politics, but it's still worth writing about.
The chapter "I Like Guys" starts with a teacher complaining about the new racial integration program of the school, reminding everyone in the class that, "The thing to remember...is that more than anything in the world, those colored people wish they were white" (pg. 82). She proceeded to make fun of gays right in front of Sedaris' face, reminding him of the insults the PE teacher used to yell out loud, "Look at you!...You're a group of ladies, a pack of tap-dancing queers"(pg. 83). Unresponsive to the humiliation, Sedaris responded by fantasizing with his French tourist girlfriend he would kiss in the sunset once he went to Greece for the summer. As he mocks his world, the author shows that his innate gayness was simply fixed and people's responses just plainly rejecting. The author uses satire to describe human nature and its silliness.
The author had started getting along with his gay summer camp roommate as their common misunderstanding in the insult "faggot" brought them together. They made fun of their counselor telling them not to be faggots that can't make their beds. Sure... They laughed saying phrases like "sticking faggots" or "faggoty faggots," as the author analyzes people's use of that word. They stopped getting along and started humiliating each other in public, getting nowhere other than becoming more insecure.

Sedaris doesn't want to write an essay about society's discrimination and exclusion of homosexuals nor about the psychological effects it has on one. His book is not critiquing American society and the modern world. Instead, he uses the art of satire to show the small things underneath those things. As I've seen through Naked, satire is a way to observe the way we humans are in perhaps a more advanced way than a straight-foward academic paper.

Words Should Be Words

Garner's and Greene's language debate was pretty much between the relative extremes, debating whether it should be one side or the other. I do like better Greene's ideas, as they seem quite moderate and reasoning, as long as they comprehend the world. There's places for different types of language, that's why it's not an equation or something a computer can do. I think that language rules or how we perceive it should take into account the context. It's not the same to write an academic paper than a business plan, a blog or a cellphone text message. I like the descriptivist side better, given that language certainly evolves and changes so there isn't an all-time way it should be used, but I understand that in some cases regulations are necessary.
Language evolution is good, it improves how we express our ideas and communicate with each other, but when writing for professional purposes it's not the perfect time to get creative. A standardized language is essential for things where clear communication in crucial. The UN General Assembly needs heads of state to, well, state things. A business proposal or a financial report shouldn't include alternative spellings and a poetic grammar. The prescriptivist side of language is necessary for communication to work in such cases. I'd like to see how the peace negotiations with FARC work with made up words and colloquial diction.
While we do need some rules for formal things, for language to be expressive and continue changing for better, informal writing should be approached in a descriptivist way as long as it's words have meanings. The recent texting era has made people change language to words that are shorter, faster to write and sound "cool." I get the point if you're a frustrated teenager seeking to feel popular through your internet personality, but nonsense grammar and short phrases don't communicate much. Overall, I feel that language should be free and approached in a descriptivist way as long as it doesn't start having an evolutionary degeneration. Language evolution has been considered good so far as it has made expression complex in a good way, but if it becomes something that destroys communication, I'd go for the prescriptivist side of the debate.

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Descriptivist: Someone who describes language as it is used (generally more accepting in how it can be used).

Prescriptivist: Someone who focuses on how language should be used (generally less accepting in the proper use of language).

Memoir Collection

http://issuu.com/aplangcomposition/docs/the_essence_of_remembrance

Behind the Mockery

I started reading Naked by David Sedaris and was soon trapped by the amusing satire. The memoir is composed of autobiographical essays without a unifying theme but definitely all tied together by Sedaris' dark humor. The first couple of chapters related to his early childhood. He wrote about his arrogance and presumed superiority and about his random ticks, both worthless are experiences but good examples to analyze everyday life. I might be just guessing based on the first few pages, but the essays seem to be satirical and entertaining ways for the reader to reflect and for Sedaris to explain how he is. The first chapter, just a few pages long, especially made me laugh as the author analyzes a child's selfish perspective into the adult world, and the stupidity that many of the never get rid of. Referring to his mom and her constant pregnancy, Sedaris writes, "Rather than improve her social standing, she chose to spit out children, each one filthier than the last" (pg. 6). As he ridicules his growing family and their lack of a private jet, Sedaris mocks human behavior, mostly his own. On the next chapter, "A Plague of Tics," he mocks how the world responded to what was just OK for him. Worried that he licked every object, touched everything with his nose and enjoyed making high-pitched squeaks, his mom and teachers met in efforts to end his tics but rather drank all night to the point of inviting each other to vacations. 

More than just funny and amusing, satire is a way to analyze human nonsense. As I kept reading the book, I did laugh about his Greek grandmother's tendencies and the usual clash she had with her daughter-in-law, but there's more to it. Based on the first impressions I got from the memoir,  I think Sedaris, like many do through satire, will be mocking human behavior, the way our society works and many personal things to criticize and observe them.