Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All

In William Manchester’s essay, Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All, he describes his experience fighting the battle off the coast of Japan during WW2 and how it has affected him. He also gives background about war and how it has evolved to what it is today. Manchester’s writing is unarguable because it is based almost entirely off his personal experience of battle as well as his life after the battle.

          This essay, although it mostly talks about the battle, is written at the time of a reunion. Manchester, along with other American Veterans who fought at Okinawa, were to meet up with veterans who fought for the Japanese. Manchester then sets about explaining why this reunion happens as well as why the tense feelings around it are the only thing the Americans and the Japanese have in common. However, Manchester’s ultimate purpose in writing this essay is one that seems synonymous in almost every veteran’s writing: bearing witness. He wants to tell the younger audience what war is really like. Manchester goes to great lengths to describe what he thinks is a horrible attitude he sees in America. He talks about the parades he sees and how the “myths of warfare are embedded deep in our ancestral memories.”

          The most important rhetorical device in the essay by far is the allusion to Sands of Iwo Jima. Manchester makes his essay about spreading the truth of war and the dramatic 1949 film is everything he, as well as all his fellow veterans, have grown to hate. This film depicts the war in such an embarrassingly dishonest manner, that when the star, John Wayne, appears at the hospital where Manchester and other gravely wounded veterans are, they boo him out before he could even make a statement. Sections of the essay like this make it seem like it was written for other veterans. Surely veterans who saw battle could laugh and clap at that story but to others, it is slightly depressing to read about someone getting booed out by a bunch of wounded veterans. Nonetheless, Manchester perfectly executes his purpose. He exposes the “myths of warfare.”

via pinterest.com Andy Noble
Fighter Jets fly over football stadium while the fans show their enthusiasm for the killing machines.

"...they regard uniforms, decorations, and Sousa machines as exalted, and those who argue otherwise are regarded as unpatriotic."

The Creation Myths of Cooperstown

Stephen Gould wrote The Creation Myths of Cooperstown for the Natural History Magazine. As a Harvard Graduate working in paleontology and evolutionary biology, Gould has had plenty of experience dealing with creation myths. Gould begins his essay by explaining an incident in which a man named George Hull created a huge man out of gypsum, buried it underground, pretended to discover it, and told everyone he had found some sort of biblical being. He then explains that a disappointingly large portion of the public fell for this. Gould then compares this to the creation myths of baseball. He explains that it is ridiculous to say that baseball was invented at one point in time. Baseball simply evolves.

          Upon reading this essay, the author’s frustration is evident.. He is frustrated with the baseball creation myth but also probably with a much larger creation myth in the book of genesis. Gould debunks the creation myths of baseball, and also the one of the Cardiff Giant, to reveal how uncritical the public is, and maybe the reader too. Gould is not a baseball historian; he is an evolutionary biologist. This essay is a mere example in Gould’s much bigger argument against the creation story of the bible. He reveals this near the end of the article by diving into Darwinian evolution.

          The way in which Gould makes these arguments is interesting. First, there is the indirect allusion to the “Bible vs Science Debate,” which he references when he draws “contrast between creation and evolution stories of baseball.” However, baseball is not the true focus of the essay, and neither is the Cardiff Giant. This makes the majority of the essay seem like mere anecdotes, or at least extended metaphors. The true creation myth of Genesis is comparable to the creation myth of baseball, and Gould uses the myths of baseball and the Cardiff Giants, which we know to be false, to show that anyone choosing the bible over modern science could be falling for a massive trick. It would be impossible to argue against that.

via ebay.com
The evolution of baseball.

The Disposable Rocket

             John Updike’s The Disposable Rocket describes what it is like to live in an ageing man’s body. He discusses the struggles and the advantages of the male body and compares them to those of a female’s body as well as how both bodies gradually betray their owners. He also delves into the mental differences and how the genders vary in thought. The writer, John Updike, has had the honor of working alongside many famous authors including J. D. Salinger, Henry Green, and James Joyce. Updike himself won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1980 for his book Rabbit is Rich.

          When Updike wrote this essay, he was on the receiving end of his body’s betrayal. As a 59-year-old man, Updike realized that his body had begun to give up at his expense. Updike wrote this essay to make younger readers appreciate their bodies while they can, and to take care of them. Another reason he may have wrote it is to explain the experience of being a man to women reading the essay. Since nearly everyone will only ever experience what it’s like to be one gender, it can be very helpful to gain understanding of the other. For these reasons, Updike was likely writing towards a younger audience. An older man reading this essay would not learn as much, but may enjoy it as they could relate to Updike’s struggles.

          Most of the essay is an onslaught of literary devices. In the very first sentence, Updike describes inhabiting a man’s body as “much like having a bank account.” He concludes with the analogy of a man and his body being like a boy and his buddy with his parents’ car keys, you’re “just along for the ride.” These metaphors and analogies make Updike’s claims easier for the reader to understand. While the way he describes ageing is powerful, his comparisons between male and female bodies are questionable. No one has substantial credibility to speak on the other gender’s behalf.

via reddit.com u/slivr33

"Any accounting of male-female differences must include the male’s superior recklessness, a drive not, I think, toward death, as the darkest feminist cosmogonies would have it, but to test the limits, to see what the traffic will bear—a kind of mechanic’s curiosity"