The Pro of Cons: Deception in Huckleberry Finn

I'm sure we can find a lot of good things about the eponymous hero of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: He worried for the horse-riding "drunkard" in the circus, exposed the King and Duke's con to steal the Wilkins inheritance, and - more importantly - he turned his back on society's notions just to free Jim, becoming the only white guy to not be completely racist. Yes, yes - I'm sure our society today would be glad to give him gold stickers for all these admirable qualities. But what about his other qualities, specifically his knack for lying on demand? Doesn't that warrant a sticker too?

I think so... just not in terms of ethics.

Now maybe it's because I admire it as a twist of language (like poetry or word play), but there's definitely something beautiful about a good lie glibly executed; I respect a guy who can conjure something believable right on the spot to escape sticky situations. In fact, Huck Finn's ability to lie organically and deceive others was probably one the biggest things I enjoyed in this book.

As Huck sailed from one mess to another, I was constantly amazed with how his lies helped him avoid hot water.  I was impressed with the way he spun different childhoods to try to fool Mrs. Loftus and the Grangerfords, completely impromptu; I was shocked with the way he convinced the ferry man to look for the broken steamboat even while he was under stress; and I was jealous of the way his acting complimented his believable storytelling to effectively scare the two bounty hunters away from Jim. I was even amused by wily Mrs. Loftus herself whose deceptively innocent tests accurately exposed Huck (The cow and horse trivia? Clever. The different reaction of genders to a danger "down there"? Genius.). Meanwhile, Huck's deception resourcefulness won some admiration too: the decoy campfires to avoid Mr. Loftus and the elaborately faked death definitely showcased Huck's abnormal acuity for a thirteen-year old.

But for all the praise I give to them, lying and deception are still generally deplorable by virtue of the con men. After all, it was their attempt to exploit a grieving family that shamed Huck to be human and eventually incensed him to finally be honest in the book. And it was the con men's feathery demise that compelled Huck to lament how evil people can be.

I think that, given the two ways you can look at it, deception is as complicated as morality in Twain's book; both possess a duality that makes it hard to simply categorize actions as either black-or-white. On one hand, you can - like I do - admire liars for their quick-wit and elusiveness. But on the other hand, you can condemn liars for their selfishness and irresponsibility. Deception isn't a harmless display of wit like word play after all; it has its winners and its losers.

On that note (and because I don't know how to seamlessly wrap this up), here's another knot to the idea of deception and lies:

"Only the best liars can lie to themselves."

Until the next due date, I guess!

Dissecting a Surgeon: A Ted Talk Analysis

A lot of people will dismiss homework as another chore - largely because it is. However, if you adopt a curious approach and hum the "clean-up song" loud enough, you can usually wring out some entertainment from it and better absorb the lesson. Fortunately, the guys at TED Talk know this; that's why they embed in their presentations striking eye-candy and funny caricatures that schoolmarms classify as "visual rhetoric" - the analysis of which is the focus of this assignment. So, to liven up this homework, I decided to do a rhetorical analysis...of an analysis of recurring Ted Talk rhetoric, bioinformatician Sebastian Wernicke's "Lies, damned lies and statistics (about TED Talks)".


In his presentation, Wernicke lampooned how an obsession with viewer popularity can seduce TED Talk to spiral from an intellectual forum to an open-mic. Because this topic is really about the folly of TED viewers, he could've easily offended his audience (who are avid TED viewers themselves), and he would have already lost his argument. To avoid potential ire, he wisely resorted to humor because it's the safest way to get a touchy point across.


In fact, Wernicke had such a keen awareness of his audience that his likability and personality - his ethos - became his primary appeal. You can just look at his presentation's title to see what I mean: his tasteful use of "damned" directly appeals to our unspoken respect for irreverence (an effective method certain teachers have discovered). By choosing profanity instead of pretentious technobabble, Wernicke hooked us to his video, appearing as an approachable, down-to-earth guy with a potentially relatable topic. And his actual presentation wasted no time in continuing that bridge between himself and the audience: one of his early slides depicts a messy equation choked with variables. By portraying the equation as arcane, he not only created a mock-serious tone but also distanced himself from it, bringing him closer to the audience as an average Joe; his supposedly shared confusion creates a commonplace with them. In fact, the overall format of his slideshow was all about courting the audience: his font resembled handwriting, his diagrams looked brusque, and his arrows and pointers seemed scribbled. Even his slides' vocabulary was limited to layman terms like "good words" and "bad words." All together they gave off an impression of informality that disarms the audience to his argument. 


Veering off visual rhetoric for a moment, the biggest red flag that yelled "ETHOS!" was midway when Wernicke said, "…they’re going to hate me for revealing this…" Yes, ladies and gentlemen, in an act of what seems to be pure selflessness on his part, Wernicke has completely severed any "relations" he had with any unspoken third parties and pledged himself completely to our "side." Again, he aligns himself with the audience, this time as the "reluctant speaker" who's so loyal to his listeners that he's willing to be "hated" by TED moderators.


Back on pictures, he concluded in his mock-serious tone by presenting the "tedPad", "a matrix of highly curated sentences." The images purposefully made the tiny words illegible, caricaturing the absurdity of resorting to gimmicks instead of quality information to keep an audience. But the cherry on top was the TED Talk Hero drawing - a parody of Guitar Hero that served as a visual hyperbole to drive Wernicke's point home: TED Talks’s continued obsession over popularity and viewer ratings would discredit it as an intellectual forum.


By the end, his rhetoric effectively nailed his argument to his audience - all thanks to his adroit use of simple diction and informal PowerPoint format, which won him massive appeal from the audience. In fact, you could even say that Wernicke was so successful in connecting with them that, as he left the stage, the audience was tugged off their seats to give him a standing ovation. [ba-Dum-ch.]