Don Delillo 's White Noise

This world is filled with many troubles including racism. Society often depicts whites as superior to blacks. However, this is not precise, because every race has both good and bad within it. The world is trying to break away from racism to become a better place for everyone around the world. Racism is not only about the color of one’s skin, it can impact individuals around the world due to their race or religion. The title of this novel is “Black and White” by Paul Volponi. In this coming of age story, two friends, Marcus Brown and Eddie Russo, who are black and white (respectively), are senior basketball stars at their high school. Marcus lives in community housing which is fraught with crime with a single mother. On the other hand, Eddie lives in a private house nearby where Marcus lives. Both Marcus and Eddie are in financial hardships and need to find easy money to cover their school and basketball fees. The two agree to start pulling robberies when they unintentionally shoot a black man. They are left in anxiety trying to avoid getting caught while trying to lead a normal life after the incident. They both end up going through the justice system, and Marcus must serve jail time while Eddie gets to go free. While all of this transpires, Marcus and Eddie manage to keep their friendship strong and overcome any barriers together. Any true friendship can overcome racial stereotypes put in place by society including the racial barrier between Blacks and Whites. The novel

Good afternoon/morning ladies and gentlemen. Consumerism is defined by the English oxford dictionary as continual expansion of one's wants and needs for goods and services. Bruce Dawes’ poems “Televistas” and “Enter Without So Much As Knocking” critique the powerful and persuasive influence that companies have on our society.

With the proposed concepts, such as branding in commercialism, High Culture/Low Culture, and the false promises made in uniform products, one is granted to see today’s society as hovering closely to a capitalistic system set up to facilitate the vast desires of the masses. As Adorno and Horkheimer bluntly put it, “personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions” (71). We can only think of ourselves as just another gear in the American machine, churning away endlessly and waiting to be fed with the uniformity of culture, the greed, manipulation, and

The feel-good essence of a lot of commercial pop music has the outcome of concealing the reality of structural where a people may not be treated as equals around the world (McKay, 2000, p.2). Therefore, commercial pop music has the triple socialising effect of having listeners forget the environment that they live in, having them believe there is validity in commercial power, and of muting people by mass-producing blaring, fused type of pop music while censoring others. This is concerning since the increasing variety of media controlled by the same corporations. An argument to this is that this feel-good aspect can help consumers feel, that they have escaped the conditions they live in. (McKay, 2000,

Advertisements are an extremely prominent part of American society. Very few places exist that an individual can go without being exposed to some form of ad. From product placement to billboards, advertisements exist in nearly every facet of life. Marion Nestle discusses what she considers to be one of the more heinous forms of advertisement in her essay, “The Supermarket: Prime Real Estate.” Nestle uses several persuasive techniques to convince her audience of the evils of supermarkets. Her use of emotionally charged phrases paired with her more logical assertions help to drive her point home while her clear bias and lack of supportive source detract from her overall argument

In today’s mass media, it is quiet common for advertisers to assimilate class into their commercials. These advertisements portray a certain level of elegance because of the sophisticated choice to use classical background music and thick European accents. On the contrary, other advertisers take the common-folk approach by structure these commercials around the western concept. Both of these advertising tactics supports an American paradox. As argued in Jack Solomon’s “Master of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising”, the contradiction lies in the desire to strive above the crowd and the quest for social equality.

His critiques in the text include portraying the extremely harsh working conditions faced in the capitalist manufacturing industry; as well as, showing the levels of political corruption that were prevalent in capitalist systems and telling of the absolute levels of wealth inequality and the differences between socioeconomic classes that were relevant to

Confronting texts often incite a process of discovery that can challenge worldviews. As such, composers of these texts offer fresh and meaningful insight into commonly-held conceptions, evoking emotional and intellectual discoveries that lead to renewed perceptions of ourselves and our society. Robert Gray’s imagistic poems “The Meatworks” (1982)and “Flames and Dangling Wire” (1977) serve as conduits for the confronting discovery of mankind’s ignorance of the consequences of consumerism. Author J.M. Coetzee’s novella “The Lives of Animals” (1999) violently thrusts the audience into a reaction against consumerism, hence showing how discovery can be far-reaching and transformative.

The readers of both Moss and Watters are introduced to the manipulative skills corporations hold within their mega-marketing and idea processing backgrounds. Both authors introduce their mega-marketing topics as a negative and chilling idea, in which the products that big corporations are trying to sell are related to something much simpler in terms of the effect’s it will have on the human body. For instance, Watters states “these practices are the medical equivalent of what real estate agents do to sell vacation time shares” (514). In this statement, he is comparing the selling objectives of drugs to vacation homes, and how corporations can use the same tactics in order to mega-market and sell their products. Watters is bringing up the idea of drug companies encouraging and advertising the use of antidepressants, as they are trying to change the morals and thoughts of diseases and drug usages of other countries such as Japan. Moss would agree with Watters’ idea of corporations using their persuasive actions on consumers. In his writing, he states that the world and “culture [has] become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing” (Moss 260). Both food and drug corporations take a stand in mega-marketing, pushing their ideas into the minds of consumers. Although they do not focus on separate beliefs of

“They (Food Production Corporations) may have salt, sugar, and fat on their side, but we, ultimately, have the power to make choices. After all, we decide what to buy. We decide how much to eat.” (Moss 346). In today’s society, junk food needs no introduction as everyone enjoys the taste of junk food because it is fast, tasty, and affordable but not everyone knows what all goes into their food. Over the years the food industries have drastically changed how food is produced and manufactured. Moss reflects upon the motivations and practices by the food industries which have transformed the American food supply by the use of the three key ingredients, salt, sugar, and fat. Through Michael Moss’s use of rhetorical appeals in his book Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, he discusses the extraordinary science behind what is considered tasty food, how multinational food companies use the key ingredients, salt sugar, and fat to increase sales and how other literary elements can help create trust between the author and audience thus increasing the effect of his arguments.

In 1899, Florence Kelley instigated The White Label Campaign of the National Consumers League (NCL), an organization dedicated to promoting proper working conditions and fair living wages for factory laborers.1 By linking middle-class women reformers with trade unionists in conjunction with the use of labels, the NCL successfully advocated for legislation to establish safety standards and maximum work hours during the Progressive Era.2 The NCL worked to help consumers know goods were produced through consumer sovereignty, which suggests the consumer is the one who can influence the production of goods.3 The White Label Campaign presents the idea that it is the responsibility of the consumer to “demand safety and reliability from the goods and services they buy.”4 In addition, the outcome of this campaign brought awareness to American society during the Progressive Era; this showed that natural human rights are not a privilege, but a right. The purpose of the White Label Campaign was to identify and label goods made under fair living wages and proper working conditions, and to compel consumers to take responsibility to support white-labeled companies.

order to ascertain whether or not the roles of these concepts do help us to

In Hans Taparia and Pamela Koch’s New York Times online article “A Seismic Shift in How People Eat,” posted on November 6, 2015, the current struggle that big food companies are experiencing in relation to increased consumer awareness is discussed. Prompting this article is the overwhelming movement to healthy eating by the general populace and the havoc it is wreaking on corporate companies. Highly popular among health enthusiasts of all ages, the topic of this paper appeals to a wide audience. Although easily missed at first due to the beautiful flow and structure of the paper, the opinions and claims by Taparia and Koch are primarily based in logos where facts and statistics are quoted, and a fair amount of pathos where vivid imagery is utilized to paint a picture of the scenario for the reader. Differing slightly from the normal presentation, the ethos of the paper is not so much enforced through personal titles or anecdotes, but rather through the combination of presenting the ideas and facts clearly and persuasively, all adding to the author’s credibility. When the paper comes to a conclusion, the reader is left with a solid understanding of how big food companies are finally being forced to share their dirty secrets and clean up their act in order to compete with the small scale, organic based companies and the jeopardy they are facing unless they change their ways drastically.

. . , Ford Motors, and the United Fruit Company” (Fernandez 3; line 4, 5, and 7). The corporations are imagery of “consumeristic propaganda” (Hawkins 43).

Hunger for luxury items and people’s strife for the brands and items they associate with being beyond reach is paramount for this system. It is this drive for items one can’t have that the author feels is one of the benefits of consumerism. He declares, “…the aspiration of the poor to