First:
- Type out your two favorite Bushisms. Then briefly analyze (a) his error in fact, grammar, or decorum, and (b) what makes that error funny. (Don’t worry about his politics–this isn’t a pro- or anti-Bush occasion, just a chance to mine his rhetorical gold.)
- Using the Borowitz Report(Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., The Onion (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., and the previous satirical videos, write your own satire. It should be a paragraph long (around ten sentences).
Remember that satire is basically humorous “fake news” that ridicules some aspect of society. (Think of Saturday Night Live.) Satire imagines an event or a dialogue that did not actually happen. It is NOT a literal re-telling of real events.
You can write both 1 and 2 in the same post.
For full points, follow the directions above and write lucid, organized, grammatically-correct prose.
Second:
- Listen to the following audio streamby clicking on the play arrow in this link (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. Fifty-eight minutes long, it contains four personal stories captured for the radio program This American Life. [Browsers such as IE, Chrome, and Firefox all play the audio clip well.]
The theme is people who do bad (rather, semi-bad or illegal or slightly embarrassing) things and get away with them, and later disclose that fact.
+ Transcript (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. if you wish to read along.
- Please answer the following questions:
- a) Which story (knee defender, boy riding with mom on drug transport, listeners sharing stories, young girls take free flights, businessman deceives to get a preschool bill passed) was your favorite? Why?
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b) We’ve all done something semi-bad and gotten away with it. Please share one such story. Tell us the narrative, and also the critical thinking that you used to enable your “getting away with it.”
c) If you could get away with anythingtomorrow, what one thing would you choose to do? (Nothing violent, please.)
