Juxtaposition of Mahatma Gandhi and General Patton
The above black and white pictures exhibit two world-renown leaders: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and General George Smith Patton Jr. Both of these men demonstrated an individual and heroic style of leadership. In these pictures, they are each speaking to a group of followers and the circumstances in which they are speaking are quite similar. Both pictures are taken during the day and the leaders are speaking outside on some kind of elevated level, Gandhi on a stage and Patton standing in a jeep. Both of them carry an air of respect and this is apparent through the undivided attention they are receiving from their listeners. The listeners are crowded around the leaders and it appears that they are there solely to hear the leaders speak.
Regardless of the many similarities, the emotions generated from these two photographs are drastically different and this can be explained through contrasting the images’ details. The most striking disparity is the body position of the leaders. Gandhi is indeed physically elevated on a stage, but he is kneeling in front of his followers, eliminating the feel of superiority. A deeply religious man, he leans forward towards them and extends his hand in a gentle and assuring manner, just as you might expect from a loving grandfather to his young grandson. And the followers are certainly responding to him, quiet and eager to learn what he has to teach. The listeners are sitting in relatively straight rows very close to the stage making it feel like a calm and intimate environment. When this picture was taken, I imagine it was comfortably quiet, with only the sounds of nature and the voice of Gandhi to be heard. All eyes are on him, with the exception of one man in the background, who appears to be standing guard. In the picture of Patton, the feeling is completely different. The soldiers in the other picture are indeed listening, but it feels uncomfortable and Patton is intimidating. The power in Patton’s straight posture is overt and it is obvious that he does not attempt to make personal connections with those listening. Rather than speaking to them, he is commanding them, as his high position required of him. The soldiers are standing facing Patton but do not yearn to hear his words. They are also bunched together in an unorganized fashion unlike the straight rows in the other picture.
Patton is donned in a military uniform and a helmet. Although the men around him also have helmets and similarly styled long-sleeve shirts, it’s clear that Patton is in charge because he is wearing an actual army outfit while the others appear to be in their personal clothing. Patton looks very official and authoritative. Gandhi on the other hand is wearing white linen pants, no shirt, and a white traditional hat. His clothing choice is much like what the listeners are wearing, but he is the only one without a shirt. His clothing is very humble, and does not indicate that he is superior to the crowd.
The perspectives in these pictures also vary greatly. In comparison to the listeners, Gandhi looks very small and vulnerable. He is without a shirt and on his knees very close to those around him. Patton is standing tall at a further distance from the crowd than Gandhi and boasts his superiority. He looks larger than everyone else which further adds to his conceited nature. However, it appears that those crowded around Gandhi has more respect for him than those around Patton. The faces of those listening to Patton are in darkness from the shade cast by their helmets. The setting is also uncomfortable as it looks like too many people are crammed into the picture. The amount of negative space in the picture of Gandhi is significantly greater than that in Patton’s picture. It is also white while Patton’s photo has dark negative space.
Another detail contributing to the strength of the picture of Gandhi is the pillars that vertically mark the picture. Gandhi kneels between two white pillars in front of the crowd. These solid lines give the illusion of structure and stability. The only vertical lines in the picture of Patton are the slouching figures of the soldiers and Patton’s solo undeviating posture that is on the extreme left. Patton’s positioning makes the photo unbalanced and uncomfortable to look at. The heads of the listeners that are standing facing away from the camera are cut-off and because they were the only indication that there were others standing to the right of Patton, it is unclear exactly how many people were present at the time it was taken.
These images of Mahatma Gandhi and General Patton illustrate the historical context of these two leaders very well. From the attention received from the listeners, it is clear that both men were respected leaders, but they had very different styles of leading. Their motivation was arguably different as Patton could be viewed as egotistical careers man while Gandhi a man working simply to further the cause of others. Patton believed that “As long as you attack them, they cannot find the time to attack you.” He was a die-hard military man that was responsible for murdering the lives of countless people, but he justified it, stating that to reach the goal it had to be done. He also said that “The pacifist actually refuses to defend what defends him: his country. In the final analysis this is the most basic immoral position.” When taking Patton’s words and applying them to Gandhi’s achievements, I can’t believe how wrong he was. Gandhi led a revolution of non-violence and changed the world forever. He personally moved every man that followed him, and even after his assassination, his legacy lived still. A good leader’s followers can go out without him.
There have been a countless numbers of leaders in the world. Even more infinite are the numbers of different leading styles. Gandhi and Patton had extremely different methods of leading and they were both successful. But the point is that there is no textbook definition for leadership and how one leads, whether it’s through vision, aggression, or peace, different situations can call for a variety of different solutions. This exhibits an essence of an aspect of human nature that demands leadership. When one man stands up and voices his passion, it starts a ripple of thought and innovation. If that man chooses to lead a group that shares that same passion, an extraordinary movement can occur and changes can be made. But the saying that safety lies in numbers is true. An idea only survives in the spirits of people and it can only flourish if it is spread. A leader needs followers. A leader without followers is just taking a walk.
Image Sources:
http://netcake.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html
http://www.generalpatton.org/Patton_Saber/PattonSaber_Spring03.htm
Works Cited:
Campbell, A I. “Bibliography of General George S. Patton, Jr.” General George S. Patton Jr. 23 Apr. 2008 <http://www.generalpatton.com/biography.html>.
India Watches Gandhi’s Ashes Scattered. MSNBC. The Associated P, 2008. 23 Apr. 2008 <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22916638/>.
Shelley makes some contradictory claims here. She starts out using the strategy of metaphor/simile, terming poets as the person within whom the “power” resides, making them sound like royalty. But then she goes on talk about the most celebrated writers of composition, and admires the “electric life which burns within their words.” This makes the piece more confusing when it is placed alongside her original statement that poets capture emotion more effectively than anyone, saying that they have the “power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature.” Then she goes on to make satirical-sounding remarks, gushing over the brilliance of poets and their superiority, and then she pairs those compliments with qualifiers that negate them. “…The words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves” she says. I think where she is going with this is that poets have a lot of power because of how they are received, but that the work they produce often didn’t mean to them what it meant to those who interpreted it – that it was just random, not the “work of art” that people accept it as.
If I were going to draft an outline response to this essay, I would begin by identifying the main point of the article. Kennan’s point was that military enforcement does not run the lives of Americans. Next, I would contradict this claim, by supporting it with back up evidence. Kennan is false, but this is because he is dated. Since this was written in the early 1950s, society enforced people to act a certain way rather than the police. People were concerned about their neighbors, friends, or strangers and whether or not they were Communists. However, looking back on the following generation, the 60s, the police were much more involved in enforcing laws, than society. WTO is an example close to home where the police were using aggression in Seattle riots. Kent State is another example when the police over-enforced their ‘rights’. While our society still has a set of norms, it is not comparable to countries in Asia, where collectivism is more stressed than individualism. United States has now turned the police into the enemy rather than the friendly helper.
Anderson’s humor stands out in this book review of “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.” It is the most convincing part of his rhetoric as he makes fun of books, readers, the book in particular that he is supposed to be reviewing, and himself. He points out his own flaws and inadequacies with the words “My signature move is a mildly orgasmic “Mmmmm,” which manages to suggest several things simultaneously: agreement, disagreement, ambivalence, and above all that my familiarity with the book in question is so deep it’s become muscular and sub-verbal, less a literary opinion than the visceral appreciation of a jaguar for the dawn.” Anderson is entertaining in his self-deprecation, which subtly draws attention away from his inability to actually review the book and towards his real argument about reading as a social booster and that “real reading is not just hoarding fodder for coctail chatter, it’s crawling, phrase by phrase, through a text and finding yourself surprised or disappointed or ruined or bored with every other line.”
Julie’s alarm clock startled her awake. In a daze, she felt around for the snooze button. “Just 5 more minutes” she promised to her prudent alarm clock. After a suspicious five minutes, the impatient alarm clock created another racket. “Fine! I surrender!” Julie mumbled to herself. Going about her morning routine, she managed to trip over a half-eaten apple, some skewed DVDs, and pile of unfinished AP Composition homework. Julie had somehow managed to let herself care less about homework and more about socializing with friends. Her thoughts of 5-paragraph essays drifted to more interesting topics like college the next year and the exciting classes she planned on taking with her major. Thus, unfinished homework had become a daily occurrence and her grades suffered as a result. “I’ll just finish it during Spanish.” She thought to herself.
After eating a banana, Fleur set the it down. She was sitting in her language arts class and she decided she was done. Done with being a senior. Done with being at this god-forsaken school, and most importantly done with sitting in a class getting pointless homework that she knew she would not do anyway. She sighed and glanced up at the teacher who’s scruffy looking blond hair and shaggy bear bear always seemed to have something stuck in it. At the beginning of the year, Fleur would have said something to him, but she figured meh he doesn’t seem to mind why should i?
There were 8 weeks of school left and Fleur with her shimmery flowing blond hair decided that she just wanted to be a wizard again. She had spent her last year of school pretending to be a muggle, and now it seemed like such a stupid idea. Except for the fact that she couldnt really go back since she was in hidding from Lord Voldemort. When the bell rang to release them from class, Fleur ran out of the rooms and into the woods nearby. There she cast a spell and felt satisfied for the day. When suddenly out of no where DEATHEATERS!!
Along with the being a slacker second semester seinor she had to fight oh deathereaters. Fluer goaned and lifted her shimmery looks in her hair and pulled, hard. “Ah well this is the life of an in hiding wizard pretending to be a second semester muggle at a school that was ridiculous.” They lifting her wand she screamed “Avada Kedavra”
The fog of war was surprisingly an interesting movie. It talked about Robert MacNamera and how he became of secretary of defense and how his brilliant career ended. He was a very brilliant man and the film seemed to try to evict sympathy. The film showed close ups of Robert talking and then showed pictures of him and the president or just pictures of things that he was talking about. Overall the rhetorical strategies used in this film seemed to have a good outcome for MacNamera. At the end of the film he seemed satisfied with what he had done, for he had tried to prevent nuclear way with cuba and the Soviet Union.
Yikes. I actually haven’t seen that picture before. When I first saw it, it had a very powerful and immediate message. The Just the small details of the picture add to it as well, such as the violence in the aggressor’s young face and the apathy in those standing nearby. Then I found out that the man being attacked was a prestigious Yale-graduate lawyer for the Supreme Court. This man was intelligent and certainly proud of his home-country, but these attackers saw nothing beneath the color of his skin, or cared to. It’s amazing how blinded people can become through rage. I wonder how the boy felt after he saw the picture in all of the papers and found out who the victim was. It’s amazing that this photographer captured this moment so perfectly, showing where it was happening and the expressions on everyone’s faces. This photographer seems to be extremely talented and well-known. The one that he took of the woman and child falling to their deaths from the fire escape was horrifying. Those kinds of pictures are very powerful, but I don’t think those pictures should be published; it’s too graphic. That is pure terror captured on film. He has an amazing gift of capturing heart-stopping moments on film, but sometimes that kind of horrible truth is too much for people to see.
Canaday used a lot of different visual rhetoric terminology to analyze the two paintings that he discussed in his essay. In the first painting, “The Peales,” he uses words such as background when discussing the positioning of objects in the painting, and balance when discussing where each of the family members are standing. For balance, he says that there is a distinctive line that separates two different clusters, six on the left and three on the right. Then he describes how the fruit on the table was placed in such a way that it made it appear like the two clusters were really two parts of a whole and that there was a cohesive connection between all of the people in the painting. So he is saying that even there there is a little bit of unevenness in the distribution of people, there is balance because of the subtley postioned fruit on the table. Then he continues to describe the nurse and how it is clear that she is part of the group, yet removed at the same time. He says that the tones used to paint her were more subdued and she although she was standing pretty close to the rest of the people, she was not touching any of them which made it feel like she did not completely belong there. Then he talks about how all of the other people in the painting were all touching each other somehow, or addressing their presence in some way, whether it’s a hand on the shoulder, or leaning to look at something they’ve made. He says that if they were grouped all together, it would have appeared more monotomous and squished and that this is why the clustering was necessary. Some more subtle details that he mentioned included the hand of the woman holding the child. Her arm seems too long and rather than showing any detail of hands or fingers, it just fades into shadow. This makes it look like she doesn’t have a hand and is clearly an inperfection in this beautiful painting, but even mistakes just like this add to the whole picture. Familiy life is not as glamorous and perfect as this picture depicts. Obviously there is going to be some internal conflict, and this misperfection somewhat depicts that. I think that this is a pretty good analysis of the mistakes in the picture. Family life is clearly not perfect and there will be resentments and petty bickering, but in the end, when you look at the whole picture, everything comes together in a cohesive and solid painting. I think that the little squirks of family life are what make it so wonderful. The fact that you go through the hardest parts of your life with your family beside you makes the bond between everyone that must stronger. Even though he brings up the whole Freudian perspective, I think that he was right-on when attempting to explain these place of awkwardness.
When addessing “The Bellellis” portrait, his tone completely changes and the mood is very different. Not only is the portrait here very contrasting of the previous, his tone changes as well. Temperament plays a big role in the perception of a picture, and the temperament in this one is very different from the first, even though they are both illustrating a family. In this one, there are four people: a mother, a father, and two small children. The mother and children are off to the left side and the father is sitting along on the right side. It looks very unbalanced and the father looks very removed from the rest of the family. The author addresses this and says that the artist did this on purpose to demonstrate how the father is physically and emotionally removed from the rest of his family. Following the death of their son, he went through a stage of grief and heartache and further caused him to be cold towards the rest of them. I think that this unbalanced positioning was very effective in showing this disconnection.
This picture shows a woman wearing all black but with light colored hair standing in the middle of a destroyed village, hands covering her face, with light colored balloons all around her. Rhetorically, it is saying a lot. First of all, she is obviously emotionally charged, most likely with grief. She is standing in a depressing surrounding and she looks like she may be crying. This makes you think that this was her village that was destroyed because of the personal connection that is implied here. Everything about this picture says “grief” except for the balloons, which makes it a little bit confusing. My initial thought was that perhaps the destruction of her village occurred while she was away at some other place, most likely a place of joy, not like somewhere sad like a funeral or something. She had no idea what had happened, and she just found out. The joy that she initially felt is quickly depleted and now although she has the balloons fresh in her hand, she has no happiness.
After reading the caption, I have a little bit of a better understanding at what the photographer was trying to portray here. She is standing in the middle of a city center that was destoyed in a war. The war has since been stopped, but the building is still in ruins. I think the balloons are supposed to portray the “good” which is the war being over. But yet, there is so much sadness in this picture. Even what the war is over, the aftermath is still full of pain and grief, and the darkness in the rest of the frame portrays that well. Especially at a personal level, nothing will ever be the same. It’s like the whole city is so tired of the war, and even after it is over, the city is still tired. So tired that it doesn’t have the strength to rebuild and prosper once again. Because the city structurally has not recuperated, the people in it have not either. Like the still-destroyed building, the people are still destroyed on the inside and don’t have the energy to restart again.
Nicole Kim
AP Composition
Stearns P-6
Book Criticism
Hunting Mister Heartbreak
When I moved to Seattle seven years ago, I saw mountains for the first time. To a native Seattleite, the mountains are merely a part of an uninteresting constant, on par with the chronic rainfall, but their mistiness, snowy caps and breathtaking stature absolutely astonished me. The stillness of their presence was powerful yet gentle, like the big arms of a gruff construction worker cradling his first grandchild; nothing since has surpassed their tenacious allure. Jonathan Raban recreates that moment that my virgin eyes fell on the Cascades a hundred times over in Hunting Mister Heartbreak. This book is Raban’s written exploration of America from the perspective of a foreigner, and although his adventure brought him further away than from my homeland of Minnesota, he unfailingly describes exactly what I felt that day when detailing the seemingly most commonplace facets of American life, and this is what makes this book so remarkable.
Raban starts his journey by boarding Atlantic Conveyor, a huge marine vessel designed to pick-up and deliver international goods, launching from the less-than-glamorous Seaforth Container Terminal, final destination: America. Obviously idolizing author J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, who in 1782 wrote his pioneering exposition of one European’s transformation into an American, Raban takes it one step further and investigates whether an American can truly be made out of a foreigner, or as he describes it, investigates “the magical melodrama involved in becoming—and remaining—an American.”
Raban’s insatiable curiosity drives him to find out first hand. He assumes native identities and finds himself sitting on a Manhattan street corner disguised as a hobo, bluntly disregarded by the scornful passersby, then walking on an embankment in Guntersville, Alabama with his “rented” black Labrador, observing the color line between black and white men that still distinctly lurks in America. His fresh perspective is pure and uninfluenced, with almost a childlike excitement.
Raban wrote that the end of the world would probably happen in New York, “that at any second the city might suddenly collapse in on itself, the tall blocks splitting open, the great ones falling, the whole enormous, delicate structure of shafts, pipes, tunnels, and chutes bursting apart like a rotten cantaloupe.” In a flurry of elegant diction and strong voice, he makes even the most familiar facts seem brand new, and these new ideas seem appropriately fitting. Raban has the imagination of a child and the intellect of a scholar, enabling him to analyze what he sees and make a very fresh judgment on it that us natives could not have collaboratively come up with.
Not only does Raban have an amazing ability to describe what he sees, but he also exposes his feelings indirectly in this book:
“The moment you stepped on the gangplank you committed yourself—not to America but to a strange and frightening sea ritual, which would ineluctably transform you from the person you had been on the dock into the person you would eventually become, when, and if, you reached the far shore. Over there, if the ocean had done its job, you’d have a different identity, and very probably a different name.” (pg. 2)
Without stating his feelings, Raban is able to put his emotions on paper through his observations. Through careful word choice, the reader too feels what he felt. In this excerpt, Raban engages the reader through his use of second person. By this change in point of view, the reader is able to feel the hollow fear and inevitability he felt the day he boarded the ship to America. His descriptions are invigorating and give the reader a level of understanding otherwise unachievable.
Raban’s book is not just a series of events that occurred during his time in America, it tells of the exhilarating joy of one man’s profound journey to where he truly belongs. Upon his arrival to Seattle, his heart dropped the same way mind did when I first saw the mountains. To him, Seattle was a place where “you’d wake up to find things so snug and familiar that you could easily believe that you’d been born here.” He found his place in the world, the place that he was destined to find. This concept of final contentment is an epic one that claims that someday we will all find out where we fit in. Just the idea of finding true happiness and belonging, whether it is in a place, a person, or a career, is one from a fairy tale that all wish for but few achieve. Because this idea of a “happy ending” is so universal, Raban’s message will not be diluted over time, rather it will remain strong for generations to come and ring in the hearts of all of those who are brave enough to pursue it. This is Raban’s love letter to America and it urges its readers to find their final contentment, one that is worthy of a love letter just as grand.
