The Final Debate

As soon as the final debate begins, we can see that both candidates appeal to character by wearing a pin of the flag of the United States. Another example of how they appealed ethos by appearance was that Obama´s tie was blue while Romney wore one that was mostly red.  As we all know red stands for the Republicans and blue for the Democrats. Another touch I noticed on Obama was the purple bracelet that stands up for women’s cancer. They haven’t even started talking when they were all ready using ethos.  They both have very good arguments, but still Obama seemed to be taking control of the debate. Romney stutters and mumbles while he talks since Obama is constantly attacking him. Obama states that his “job as a commander in chief is to keep the American people safe” and by saying this he is appealing to pathos. He is establishing a kind of relationship with the audience: giving confidence and safety to the citizens.

Logos are seen a lot through out the debate. One example is when Obama goes against Romney when he started defending the military budget. Obama came right back to him giving shocking facts about how the US spends more on the military than the combined military expenditures of the ten countries that follow the US. With this comeback, which is actually a fact, the audience tends to lean more over Obamas side.

Through out the debate I realized that they mostly talked in present, using pathos. This way they could appeal more to values and manipulate their audience in an easier way. They have it very clear that the more they appeal to their audience emotions, the more votes they are going to get. Still, on their closing statement they both talked in a forensic and demonstrative way: talking about the future. “You now have heard three debates, months of campaigning, and way too many commercials on TV. I want to build on our strengths. And I've put forward a plan to make sure that we're bringing manufacturing jobs back to our shores by rewarding companies and small businesses that are investing here, not overseas," Obama said. We can see how he used pathos and ethos to appeal to the audience. He uses both so that the citizens feel that they have a choice, but that his choice is stronger and better looking than the one from Romney. 

Essential Tools

According to Heinrichs, “Argument by logic, emotion, and character are the megatools of rhetoric” (45). On this chapter he briefly explains us how logos is argument by logic, ethos is argument by character, and pathos is argument by emotion. As I was reading these brief explanations I realized that it’s not that easy to put into practice these three tools. But then I noticed that we use at least one of the tools everyday, without really noticing it. Every TV commercial uses logos, ethos, and pathos. They have to use them in order to convince the audience to buy their product. We see in most of commercials happy and pretty people having fun, so that you appeal to them and go buy the product. A good example is the Coca Cola commercial for the Olympic games in London.

They make you believe that by drinking Coca Cola you would become a professional athlete. So, we can see that for a businessman it is really important to know how to manipulate the audience. Still you have to know which audience you are manipulating because it’s really different to talk to a seven-year old then to a thirty year old. So on our daily basis it is really simple to put into action these tools because we know exactly whom we are talking to. But for big companies things get more complicated since they have to convince a variety of people. They have to find general ways to get to their audience. I believe here it’s the key point to whether the company is going to sell it’s products or don’t.

Only a few days ago I realized that my mom put into work all of these tools while I was at the hospital. I didn’t notice it at the time, but I constantly agreed to everything she said. The situation of my accident was way worse that what I thought, they never told me how bad it was. My mom, who was around me 24/7, was able to hide her emotions and appeal to mine. After the two first surgeries she would tell me that everything was ok but that I had to go into surgery for one more time. For some reason I didn’t get scared or sad, which would have been my usual reaction, but I instead accepted the fact. I don’t know how she managed to do that, but I guess she used logos, pathos, and ethos.

We can see how the good use of these tools is essential for life. They can help you during difficult times and they can help you lead your company to success. Am really anxious of what the rest of the book is going to talk about, since I’m learning things that I can use on the daily basis. 

Manipulating the Audience

I believe most of us think that the only way of “winning” an argument is by speaking louder, or even screaming, to the rival. Without even noticing we end up in a fight in which we both lose. When an argument turns into a fight, it means that you wouldn’t be able to reach your goal of persuading the audience. It’s not easy to see the difference between an argument and a fight. Wouldn’t an argument be the same thing as a fight, just not being insulting or physical? No. Jay Heinrichs makes it very clear in his book Thank You for Arguing that, “In a fight, each disputant tries to win. In an argument, they try to win over an audience…” (15). It is now clear that you only win when you make the audience commit to you without them noticing it. An extremely good comeback, or shutting up your opponent, doesn’t make you the winner.

According to Heinrichs there are three steps to win an argument:
1. “Stimulate your audience´s emotions” (22).

2. “Change its opinion” (22).
3. “Get it to act” (22).

This seems as a pretty easy task to accomplish. How hard can it be to change someone’s mood, concede him/her to do what you want them to do, and last but not least make them do it? I believe the process is the easy part, the hard part is making sure your audience doesn’t notice you are manipulating them and that you have the patience you hold back your come backs.

At the beginning this seemed as a really easy method to follow and I started thinking to myself that I’m now going to win every argument I have with my parents. Just as Dorothy Jr. beat her father. I thought it for a while and realized that I don’t have the patience to do it. I wouldn’t be able to control my anger and manipulate my audience in a calm way. Everyday I have an argument with my brother that turns into a fight. I can’t bear with the thought of my brother winning over my argument. Heinrichs make it sound as if it’s the easiest thing to accomplish, but its actually not. My perspective of winning changed after I read this chapter. By making the audience believe that they have “won,” you actually end up really winning. A good trick that he gives us is that, “ …one way to get people to agree with you is to agree with them—tactically, that is” (21). It’s all a game of the mind.
A good example he gives about playing with the audience mind is with the book The South Beach Diet. It sounds like a random title, but it was an effective one since the book sold over five million copies. How did they know the book would have such success? After Heinrichs analyzed it, it all made sense. The title greats a sense of emotion by “making readers picture a desirable and highly personal goal: you, in a bathing suit, looking great” (25). At the end the book said the same stuff as the other diet books, but the author and editors manipulated the audience by making them produce emotions.

At the end, Heinrichs, believes that you only need two tools to convince your audience: “set your own goals” and “set your goals for your audience” (26). 

Having Two Perspectives

Azar Nafisi travels back to the time where she taught at the University of Tehran. She starts explaining how slowly books were started to being banned, without she even noticing. Nafisi was reading The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms when the owner of the bookstore told her, “If you’re interested in those, you’d better buy them now” (91). And indeed in a few months such books were almost impossible to find. She explains how nervous she was before her first day of class because during that time the students took control of the university and expelled faculty members. What could she expect? Only bad things. The government was all ready removing foreign books and blocking its distribution, so it was obvious how the students would treat a new foreign teacher.
To my surprise the class was went well and the students showed interest toward the topics being discussed. I believe that the class went well because she was “enthusiastic, naïve and idealistic, and I was in love with my books” (93).

On the other hand I think that she showed a new perspective towards the world they were living in. She insisted on everyone to consider the world they were living around. Most of the students had lived their entire lives in Tehran so they had only lived and seen their life. They haven’t travelled and seen how the rest of the world live on a more equal and peaceful way. Living on war was just normal to them. She states, “I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes” (94). No wonder why all students were interested in her class, they wanted to learn about the world and not be stick with Iran´s war forever.

Being a teacher during that time was not a simple task. Everyone was differentiated by their political affiliations and one had to determine who was against who and who belonged to each group. She was able to determine this by the seating position of the students, “My most radical students sit in the very back row, with sardonic smiles” (94). She learned how to read people.
Most of the classes were in constant manipulation of the teachers, “I remember one day when my leftist students had canceled classes, protesting the fresh murder of three revolutionaries, I was walking downstairs when they caught up with me” (95).

Surviving the Revolutionary War as a citizen was a complete different thing as surviving it as a foreigner. Foreigners have seen the better life; they have lived it. They can easily compare how women are treated in the United States and how they are treated in Iran. By having two perspectives everything becomes more shocking.   

Reading Between Words

Reading Lolita in Tehran has to be read between the lines. The real meanings that Azar Nafisi wants to tell us are hidden between the anecdotes that she is telling us. By telling us brief summaries of books, we can see that all of the eight girls can relate their lives to the fictional books. She never tells us directly what all of these girls are going through, but she does gives us a general idea of how society is treating women during that time. If one is not paying attention to the reading, one wouldn’t notice that most of the books that they talk about in their class relate to their real lives. One example of these is when she is having a nice conversation with Yassi, and Yassi starts making her all of these “what if´s” questions. She states, “What would she look like? Would it affect the way she walked or how she moved her hands? How would others look at her?” (32) The first thing that came into Azi mind was Nabokov´s novel: Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, Ada, Pnin. What better way to explain reality through literature? She explains how this book talks about the “other world” and how you are always going to live with a shadow of another world.

Azi is constantly making analogies and comparisons in order to help us understand what’s going around them.  A very good example I found was when she was explaining how the chief film censor in Iran was blind and based all of his judgments on audio tapes. She explains how the world they were living in under the mullahs´rule was “shaped by the colorless lenses of the blind censor” (25). They were so limited for doing things that they felt as if they were blind. I found it interesting because even thought they had the chance to see their surroundings, they were not enjoying it and they were all living miserable lives. Not even their imagination could take them to happy, colorful places. As she states, “Not just or reality but also our fiction had taken on this curious coloration in a world where the censor was the poet´s rival in rearranging and reshaping reality, where we simultaneously invented ourselves and were figments of someone else´s imagination” (25).  They were so trapped in a world that not even their imagination could wonder off. With these comparisons we can see how much they were suffering and being mistreated, but still Azi would never tell us to the face what they were going through.

I also found some irony while Azi is telling us about her past. One example is the green gate of the entrance of the university. The first word that comes to my mind when I think of a gate is a prison, or something that encloses me and limits me from the rest of the world. But for Yassi that green gate represented the complete opposite: freedom. She explains, “The gate appears in this poem, and in some of her other writings, as a magical entrance into the forbidden world of all the ordinary things she had been denied in life” (29). For here that green gate represented the life that she should be living, behind that gate she wasn’t invisible, she was rather a different “thing” that every man was curious about. It was the only place were she could feel free from the rest of the society rules.

So far I have found Azar Nafisi way of writing very interesting. I like how she is telling us the stories through out other literature works and I guess she is doing this so because she wants to keep safe the real characters of her book. Since all of those girls could have gotten into trouble for going to the literature class.