Author: akennie

Respond to TS/IS Pg. 78-91 – “Playing the Naysayer in Your Text”

 

• By imagining what others might say against your general argument, you are able to strengthen your claim and persuade your audience even more. Birkenstein and Graff recollect, “Paradoxically, the more you give voice to your critics’ objections, the more you tend to disarm those critics, especially if you go on to answer their objections in convincing ways” (Birkenstein and Graff 79) If you are able to disprove or make a mockery of arguments that go against your own, you essentially are able to strengthen your argument as a whole.
• You always need a reason to counter an opposition or it can weaken or completely disarm your general argument. Birkenstein and Graff state, “One surefire way to fail to overcome an objection is to dismiss it out of hand – saying, for example, ‘That’s just wrong.’” (Birkenstein and Graff 88) By saying something inherently wrong about an opposition, but providing no solid back up to support your claim, it can disarm your own general argument and also make you look like a moron in the process.
• Writing isn’t about proving something right, it’s about stretching your beliefs and thinking critically about the world around you. Placing a naysayer in your writing forces you as a writer to shape your opinions and take fresh perspectives on pressing topics. Birkenstein and Graff write, “After all, the goal of writing is not to keep providing that whatever you initially said is right, but to stretch the limits of your thinking.” (Birkenstein and Graff 90) To strengthen your writing, you have to anticipate what will oppose it, and ultimately that improves your writing over time.

Reconsider the Lobster

 

After reevaluating my opinion the David Foster Wallace’s, “Consider the Lobster,” I have realized many things. Firstly, it’s important to reread opinionated pieces of writing, because the things that pop out at you are absolutely astounding. After reading, I realized that I don’t really care about what happens to a lobster. Which is different than how I felt earlier this semester, but it’s easy to explain. Focusing on the topic such as togetherness, and loss, and preparation for death made me realize that boiling a lobster is no more important than ordering a poorly and maybe dangerously made hamburger a McDonald’s. There are pressing issues involving the well being of the people around us and without solid scientific evidence to prove or disprove that lobsters feel pain, I have collectively chosen not to care about them for the time being. The capitalistic approach to the Maine Lobster Festival still baffles me and the reasoning behind why people still go if they’re so displeased is astounding, but that’s something I’m positive I’ll never truly understand. It’s obvious now that like any PETA protester magnetizing festival, some things need more information before someone can begin to care. Contradicting scientific evidence doesn’t really do that for me.

Dealing With The Dead

Dealing with the dead is a simple way of putting it, but coming to terms with how our loved ones are prepared and buried is something that no one wants to think about. Although I’d like to be involved in the process of preparing my loved ones for burial, I think it’s a moral dilemma on whether or not I’d be able to push a button and cremate my loved ones. I suppose after learning more about the embalming process it can certainly seem like the better of the two, but it makes me really uncomfortable to even think about putting my loved one in the ground, let alone sending them into a fiery pit of darkness for the rest of eternity.

 

Caitlin Doughty touches upon working in a crematorium and the emotional baggage that comes with that. She explained, “it becomes just a reality of your workplace because if you really took it in, in the sense of thinking, ah this is the dust of a man who is no longer here, we are all mortal.” Doughty believes that humanizing the crematorium industry is important because it’s just as sacred as anything else involving a dead loved one. While she’s working and she finds ashes on her body she recognizes that she has the ashes of someone who was just alive and someone who probably had a purpose-filled life. It’s difficult to handle that emotionally but it’s important to recognize that as human beings, appreciating the cremation of a body is really important. Doughty does this process alone. She sends strange, decomposing bodies through the cremation process alone. That is something that needs to change. Just as if we were following the process of preparing a body for burial and viewing, we should be more involved in the cremation and burial of bodies as well.

 

After exploring the three pieces involving embalming, cremation, and fast food production it has truly changed my perspective on the world around me. Although in a few months when I have moved this out of my point of view and don’t remember, I feel as though these things stick with me and will stick with me for the rest of my life. Regarding embalming, Mitford spoke a lot about hidden funeral costs, unnecessary procedures, and ultimately the sketchy added labor hours of the mortician. One thing that didn’t surprise me was that these costs would be there. Mitford explains,” This is coupled with an additional forty hours of service required by members of other local allied professions, including the work of the cemeteries, newspapers, and of course, the most important of all, the service of your clergyman. The 120 hours of labor are the basic value on which the cost of funerals rests.” (Mitford 42) Although some costs are placed there to hike up the bill, the cost of a funeral is exactly what I’d expect from Mitford’s description. A overall pricy and long process. Similarly, Michael Pollan when speaking about the preparation of fast food throughout the country. I already knew that McDonald’s wasn’t the healthiest or generally safest food to consume because of additives, poor preparation, and overall nutritional facts, but what surprised me was that fact that chemicals that could potentially kill if take in high quantities are involved in the preparation of McDonald’s food. Pollan writes, “ TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e, lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause ‘ nausea vomiting, ringing of the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation and collapse.” (Pollan 114)

 

(Note: An hour was spent on this)

Jessica Mitford “The Story of Service”

Death is something that’s difficult to think about, but it is something that is consistently in the back of everyone’s mind. We try not to think of the process that goes into funeral planning, preparation of the body, and the process of mourning, but they are all important aspects that should be considered before someone close passes away. Throughout Jessica Mitford’s book, The American Way of Death Revisited, she expressly outlines every aspect of death and the pricy costs that are attached. Mitford elegantly displays a singular message to the reader, there are hidden costs in our deaths that are not only unnecessary, but disturbing. There isn’t a ton of information out there that truly explains the process of embalming, the prices of caskets, and the overall theme of a every day funeral. Mitford states, “Yet no law requires embalming, no religious doctrine commends it, nor is it dictated by considerations of health, sanitation, or even of personal daintiness” (Mitford 43) What is significant about this is that, embalming is unnecessary yet it’s still hidden in the bill following the funereal. Much like embalming, hidden costs are common in every funeral. Newspapers, cemetery workers, clergymen, the overall 120 some odd hours of hard labor that is put into every funeral. Although Mitford makes sure to question those 120 hours, the ridiculousness of all the unneeded services showing up on the bill has brought light to my eyes. The funeral industry is exactly what is sounds like. An monopolized industry. Mitford also writes, The very term “embalming” is so seldom used that the mortician must rely upon custom in the matter…unless the family specifies otherwise, the act of entrusting the body to the care of a funeral establishment carries with it an implied permission to go ahead and embalm.” (Mitford 44) It’s sickening to think that embalming is something that is not only not well known among things that happen during a funeral, but it’s also something that is essentially hidden from grieving family members. You look at a corpse in the casket, but you don’t know that so many horrific things have happened behind closed doors to get it there. What’s also significant to point out is that the embalmer might be just as uneducated as a high school teenager. Mitford explains, “imitative surgeons, as is his technique, acquired in nine or twelve months post-high school course at an embalming school” (Mitford 45). It’s so surprising that only a short course following high school graduation could lead someone to cutting someone open and handling the preparation of a corpse.