Silent Secret: An Intergenerational Review of Mental Illness, Misdiagnosis, and Systematic Failure

Context:

Mental illness has been a prevailing issue within the United States. According to data collected by National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) in 2017, approximately 20% of adults in the United States (roughly 43.8 million individuals) will experience mental illness in a given year. The United States has a complex history with regards to how to treat mental illnesses. State-funded and operated mental institutions or “asylums” gained popularity in the 19th century after being influenced heavily by European ideals on mental illness treatment. Institutions were used as long-term care facilities although many lacked the resources (provisions, space, and staff) to adequately care for the patients. Their popularity grew rapidly as many sought refuge for family members within their walls. Many were also selfishly seeking reprieve from the responsibilities of caring for family members who needed more assistance. Since the institutions emerged across the United States, there have been several attempts at reform. The first came in the 1950s and was focused on providing proper care to patients with diagnosed mental illnesses. Treatments for mental illness were finally backed by research. The second wave of reform came to remove patients who had been deemed “mentally ill” but were actually intellectually disabled. Reforms to provide education to both children and adults with developmental disabilities followed soon after.

Problem:

It may seem that with the declining prevalence of the “asylum” and the reforms that have taken place that the United States has been progressing forward. However, one reform that has still not taken place is a reform to separate mental illness from physical illness. Some symptoms of physical illness can manifest in a way that would make it appear that the person afflicted had a mental illness. On a case-by-case basis, there has been the discovery that the mental illness a person was diagnosed with was in actuality a physical illness, however there have been no large scale reforms in this area of need.

Response:

In the 1800s, my great-great grandfather was reported by a neighbor for “speaking nonsensically” and having “delusions that included he was the President of the United States and that others had malicious intents towards him”. He was taken away from his family and placed in a mental institution where by all accounts he was treated like any other patient. He was allowed half an hour of “air-time” which meant for thirty minutes he could sit outside on a covered porch. Otherwise, his daily routine consisted of sitting in a “common” room, taking a concoction of medicine (mostly tranquilizers), and sleeping. My great-great grandmother was left to care for the children alone and from what I’ve been told, they never visited him within the asylum. Eventually, my great-great grandfather became so physically ill that the institution did not know how to care for him. They transported him to a local hospital where it was discovered that he had advanced kidney failure. One of the symptoms of kidney failure is delirium. While he was in the institution, he wasn’t ever treated for the underlying physical condition. Instead, he was subdued with tranquilizers and left to die. I wish that I could say that my great-great-grandfather’s plight was just an oversight, but constantly people who have a physical illness are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and therefore do not receive the treatment they desperately need. In my final project, I will be using the story of my great-great grandfather as the catalyst to research the magnitude of this problem and the need for another reform. I will be interviewing my grandmother for the family perspective and interviewing various professionals in the mental health field.

Personal Torture: How We Hurt Ourselves When We Hurt Others

Abstract:

When we chose to ignore that torture exists, we are refusing to acknowledge the humanity of those who have suffered. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal is an example of a torturous event that has been portrayed in various media forms that include memoir and documentary. Errol Morris directed a documentary titled “Standard Operating Procedure” that focused on the military personnel’s retelling of the events at Abu Ghraib. Morris is largely removed from his documentary, which aids in creating a distinctly different tone from Nick Flynn’s memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb. Both “Standard Operating Procedure” and The Ticking is the Bomb include portrayals of the victims, but they do so in very different ways. Morris’s reenactments serve to forward the idea that the military personnel did not regard these men as humans and Flynn’s decision to keep the survivors he met anonymous shows that he puts their privacy and humanity before what he stood to gain through the publication of his memoir. In many ways, Flynn’s memoir gives humanity to the victims of Abu Ghraib in ways that Morris’s documentary does not and is therefore more effective in telling the complete story of the torture at Abu Ghraib.

I pledge my word of honor that I have abided by the Washington College honor code while completing this assignment:
Rachel Ann West

What is torture? How does an event or series of events come to be labeled as torturous? Perhaps more importantly, how do we as a society handle the subject of torture and acknowledge those who have suffered? Torture, and the memory that can linger from it, needs to be handled with care. Often when a torturous event is brought into the public domain, the victims are blamed for their attack and dehumanized. We must be careful to present the facts about torture alongside unbiased portrayals of those who were tortured. Torture is a broad category that is difficult to encapsulate because it is highly subjective. What is torture for one person may just be an inconvenient twist of fate for another. Often, torture is highlighted in times of war when mass casualties and unspeakable events occur that make nations question the humanity of those involved. Swiss activist Peter Maurer said, “Even in war, everyone deserves to be treated humanely.” The Abu Ghraib prison scandal is one of the most recognizable examples of torture during war in recent history. The true series of events that occured is still shrouded in mystery, despite many accounts of the events having been released. Two of the most compelling retellings of the scandal are Nick Flynn’s memoir The Ticking is the Bomb and Errol Morris’s documentary “Standard Operating Procedure”. Flynn’s memoir is highly poetic and humanizes the detainees by sharing their stories alongside what he considers to be moments of torture in his personal life. Morris’s work, on the other hand, takes a more judicial approach and interviews the military personnel who perpetrated the torture. Morris’s documentary provides a highly rhetorical but extremely impersonal review of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The reenactments in Morris’s portrayal leave the audience wanting more, especially from the perspective of the detainees. Unlike Morris’s documentary, Flynn’s memoir does include stories from the survivors and through highly poetic language is able to gain the reader’s sympathy for the victims and give the victims a humanity that has been taken from them.

Flynn’s argument seems to be that everyone, regardless of their situation in life, will experience circumstances that are outside of their control. To make torture relatable to his audience, Flynn shares stories of his life that many would consider to be torture. These events include his mother’s suicide, his father’s arrests, and growing up in relative poverty. Each of these events is in itself is a point of torture for Flynn and each of these events was outside of his control. Throughout his memoir, Flynn relies on what Lanham refers to as metanoia. Metanoia is the word for the qualification of a statement by recalling it and expressing it in a better way (100). While many readers may be initially taken aback by Flynn’s constant digressing, he is actually qualifying his statements and making them clearer and more intentional. Flynn often uses metanoia when he is writing about his father. One of the most obvious examples is in the chapter titled, “god’s loneliness (known)” –

Soon – very soon – I shall be known: these are the first words my father, locked up for
robbing banks, or something like robbing banks, wrote me. His return address was
#9567328, Federal Prison, Springfield, Missouri. I often hear myself calling him a
bankrobber, perhaps because the word “bank robber” has more electricity in it than
“fuckup”. His charge was “interstate transportation of stolen securities” – he’d entered a
few banks and said a few words and passed a few bad checks and left with money that
wasn’t his. In every bank he’d been photographed, smiling into the camera. Soon – very
soon – I shall be known. Known? What else did anyone need to know?

Here, Flynn says that his father is a bankrobber and then slowly, throughout several sentences, backtracks to admit that his father was actually just a person who made unfortunate decisions and was caught. It is of particular interest to note that the original statement that Flynn is clarifying is not removed from the final version of the memoir. Rather, he maintains every sentence, even the ones he disagrees with and clarifies later.
Unlike Flynn who makes it a priority throughout his memoir to personally relate with the audience, Morris is largely absent from his documentary. He interviews the military police and others who were involved in the committing of these crimes, in the cover-up, and in the eventual release of the information regarding what happened literally behind closed doors. His reenactments further separate the detainees from the military members because they are again being put on display. In these reenactments, they are almost subjected to more torture as it is not their voice that is being played over the images and recreated video footage but it is the voice of their tormentors. They are also named by the interviewees. In stark contrast, when Flynn interviews a detainee who is the prominent feature in one of the published photographs, he gives the man the name Achmad, which is not his real name. Flynn’s choice not to reveal the man’s true identity is perhaps the most personal thing he could do. This man’s photo has been widely circulated and his personal life thrust into the public eye. By not revealing his true identity, Flynn is giving this man some of his humanity back. Despite publishing this memoir he is refusing to profit from the man’s identity by also not disclosing exactly in which picture this man is featured, whereas Morris is using recognizable photos and creating reenactments that identify those who were tortured.

Morris’s retelling of the Abu Ghraib scandal highlights the faults that our society struggles with when it comes to dealing with torture. Focusing on the perpetrators of the torture instead of seeking out and highlighting the survivors allows the audience to slip into the cognitive schema that is the “blame the victim” mentality. While some of the interviewers do acknowledge the fact that some of the prisoners were there for petty crimes and had nothing to do with the investigation into the war on terror, the audience is still permitted the space to think that these prisoners were still guilty by association. They were majority of practicing muslim, Middle-Eastern descent, that were in prison because they had not left their country. Morris’s recounting of the events gives the audience very little insight into the survivor’s perspective on the torture they endured. Instead, Morris almost seems to be out to clear the names of the military personnel that are included in the documentary. Through the use of what Lanham calls epimone, Morris has multiple interviewees share the same, or very similar, stories. Epimone is the frequent repetition of a phrase or a question in order to dwell on a point. This is evident early on in Morris’s documentary when several of the military personnel blame one individual, Graner, for the release of the pictures from Abu Ghraib. The interviewees state throughout the documentary that is was under Graner’s orders that they took pictures and carried out the various acts of torture. Since Graner is not interviewed for the documentary, the interviews turn into more of a he-said/she-said conversation which cannot be logically reasoned through by the conclusion.

Flynn’s memoir is able to provide a more personal insight into the torture because he had the opportunity to speak with some of the survivors. The audience should acknowledge that this opportunity was unique and Morris was probably not offered the same opportunity before his documentary was released in 2008. However, unlike Morris who is largely detached from his documentary, Flynn’s personal voice takes up a great deal of space in his retelling of the Abu Ghraib scandal. The Ticking is the Bomb is labeled as a memoir, which allows Flynn to be more personal and poetic. It is this reliance on his private life that provides the platform to further explore the humanity that was lost in the Morris’s documentary. By sharing the intimate details of his life, Flynn shows that torturous events can affect everyone regardless of their position in life. Flynn was a child in the United States, growing up in a lower-middle class family and the survivors of Abu Ghraib were bakers and taxi drivers. Despite their very different backgrounds, Flynn argues that the torture they experienced deeply affected all of them and that in order to fully understand how torture destroys humanity, we have to learn the stories behind the survivors.

Where Morris and Flynn’s arguments come together is on their dependence on memory. Both Flynn’s and Morris’s work would fall under the category of what Nichols calls “performative documentary” which is characterized by emotional intensity and subjective expressiveness (115). Nichols writes in his textbook, Introduction to Documentary, that “performative films give added emphasis to the subjective qualities of experience and memory” (150). Morris and Flynn are producing retellings of the events at Abu Ghraib that they were personally not there to witness. Morris’s “Standard Operating Procedure” relies on the subjective memories of the military personnel, who may or may not be telling the complete truth. Flynn is relying on intensely emotional memories of his childhood, which can be easily manipulated. Memory can be highly poetic and while the audience can be easily pulled in by a personal account they can also be just as easily removed if the memories do not engage them.

When creating a dramatic retelling of a torturous event, careful consideration needs to be paid to the survivors to ensure that the ordeal they experienced is represented validly. This is true especially in cases where the retelling of the events is not specifically done by a survivor. For Morris and Flynn, the challenge to not only accurately but adequately portray the story of the survivors was exceedingly difficult. Each author created a story that best fit their argument, but Flynn’s memoir humanized the victims through empathy coupled with detailed personal traumas. There is a fine line to walk when it comes to making torture public knowledge while also honoring the humanity of those who have suffered.

Forwarding the Known into the Unknown

Initially, Nick Flynn’s The Ticking is the Bomb and Errol Morris’s documentary “Standard Operating Procedure” seem to be two separate projects. Flynn’s memoir relies heavily on his own voice and personal experiences to make connections between his life and the torture that the detainees at Abu Ghraib experienced. Morris is mostly absent from his documentary except for when he poses a few direct questions to the military members he is interviewing. Flynn’s memoir takes time to move into the core of his argument, and away from his personal experience (which some may argue he never actually does). “Standard Operating Procedure” is clear from the beginning that the project is uncovering the motives behind the torture at Abu Ghraib. In both memoirs, the authors begin with the known (personal life, published pictures) and move into the unknown (motives of the military personnel).

“Standard Operating Procedure” is an example of documentary that Nichols in Introduction to Documentary would classify as judicial/historical or commemorative/critical. The judicial/historical approach is used to accuse or defend, justify or criticize previous actions, and poses the question of guilt or innocence and validity. Nichols says that these documents specifically examine the past to ask, “What really happened?” In Morris’s documentary, the judicial approach is evident. The military personnel who were investigated for the crimes at Abu Ghraib are featured as they try to defend themselves and their actions. The audience is left wondering not if these people are guilty, but to what extent they are guilty. The posed question of “What really happened?” is evident as the interviewees attempt to explain away the photographs that were taken inside the prison. They recount the moments before and after the picture was taken and the audience is forced to either accept or reject their word since the photographs are only capable of providing a literal snapshot into the events that took place. The documentary is also commemorative/critical because the audience goes into the viewing with an idea of the events that occurred at Abu Ghraib. The people who are being interviewed are all military personnel related to the scandal. Not one detainee was interviewed for the film, although they do appear in the photographs that Morris splices in throughout the film and some of them are identified by either their ties to the government, the “crimes” that they were brought into the prison for, or their names or nicknames. Focusing the interviews on the military allows Morris’s audience to take a more critical approach to the documentary and those involved.

Unlike Morris’s documentary, Flynn’s highly personal memoir includes stories from the detainees who he met. Flynn’s take on the Abu Ghraib scandal is that everyone, regardless of their situation in life, will experience circumstances that are outside of their control. He shares stories of his life that include his mother’s suicide, his father’s arrests, and growing up in relative poverty. Each of these events is in itself is a point of torture for Flynn and each of these events was outside of his control. When he interviews the detainee who is the prominent feature in one of the published photographs, he is in a room surrounded by lawyers. These lawyers are there to gather his statement to use in a lawsuit against an American company that allegedly profited from the torture. Flynn gives the man the name Achmad, which is not his real name. This is in stark contrast to Morris’s documentary where the detainees were named to the best of the ability by the interviewees. Flynn’s choice not to reveal the man’s true identity is perhaps the most personal thing he could do. This man’s photo has been widely circulated and his personal life thrust into the public eye. By not revealing his true identity, Flynn is giving this man some of his humanity back. Despite publishing this memoir, he is refusing to profit from the man’s identity by also not disclosing exactly in which picture this man is featured.

The forwarding of the known into the unknown is accomplished by both Morris and Flynn, just in two very distinct ways. Flynn’s personal and poetic documentary focuses on the broad sense of torture. Everyone experiences some form of torture and by forwarding his own into the scandal, Flynn is able to build a bridge of humanity. Morris is forwarding the known photographs into his interviews and therefore accomplishing a judicial/critical focused documentary. The photos were taken and published, but what is not known is why they were taken and why such extreme forms of torture were executed, let alone captured on film.

Both authors seem to agree that when we begin a project with what is known, we can use that to jump into the unknown.

 

the God-complex bomb

“You ask me if I have a God complex?
Let me tell you something –
I am God.”
Alec Baldwin

The Ticking is the Bomb by Nick Flynn is an engaging example of poetic documentary. Borrowing from the tradition of the lyric essay, Flynn writes a non-fiction piece that seems to have no defined focus at the beginning. We learn that he and his wife are expecting their first child (a baby girl), that he had to choose between his wife and a past girlfriend when he was dating both at the same time, that his father has been homeless or in prison (for fraudulent checks) most of his life, his mother passed away and he spent Christmas in Cairo to avoid festivities, and that growing up he and his siblings ate government provided cheese but were given tennis lessons by their grandfather. Flynn recounts all of this among the backdrop of 9-11, the Iraq war, and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The dichotomy of Flynn’s personal life and Abu Ghraib scandal are put on display in the first three chapters as he wrestles with the definitions and forms of “torture”.

Soon – very soon – I shall be known…

This is how Flynn begins the chapter titled “god’s loneliness (known)” about his father’s prison sentence for “something like robbing banks”. These are his father’s first written words to him after being incarcerated in Missouri. Flynn analyzes the words through the lenses of the Sufis who say that creation was caused by God’s loneliness and desire to be known. In the same way that Flynn’s father could have been seeking fame through forgery, Flynn is seeking to find himself through relationships. Like the Sufis propose, God could not know Himself until He was known to others. Flynn and his father both exhibit this same logic pattern: I must be known by others before I can be known to myself.

Taking this discovery a step further, Flynn seems to be comparing this need to be known in his own life to the Iraq war. When 9-11 happened and Flynn was in New York City, he stepped inside of a coffee shop to listen to the TV, hoping that the news anchors would have words that would make everything make sense. The United States of America was known to the world at the time of the attacks, but the Iraq war changed the way America was viewed. In the case of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, American soldiers were essentially playing God. They wanted to be known – to each other, to their victims, and to the greater world audience – or else the pictures would not have been taken in the first place. Why document something that wasn’t supposed to ever be known? They created the world inside of Abu Ghraib for their own selfish benefit – so that they could be known. I just wonder if they found themselves after the scandal broke and they were known to the larger population. (From what we have watched of “Standard Operating Procedure”, there seems to be a lot of blame-game and self-removal being done, so the answer would be a resounding “no”.)

In The Ticking is the Bomb, Flynn tackles several hard issues. Poverty. Suicide. Homelessness. Felonies. Addiction. Terrorism. War. Torture. All of these topics could be singled out and have one piece dedicated solely to them.  In fact, Flynn mentions that he has written some pieces that are exclusive to one or two of these topics (his 2005 PEN award was for a work that focused on homelessness and his father). If a reader knew going into this work that there would be several difficult topics to work through, they might become overwhelmed and discouraged. However, Flynn’s writing style makes these topics accessible and almost enjoyable.

Flynn writes using a variation of the hypotactic periodic structure. According to the blog article posted by Sean Kohingarara Strum, “Hypotaxis and Parataxis, Periodic and Running Style”, periodic style “uses parallel phrases/clauses or dependent clauses as modifiers at the start, and that thus isn’t grammatically complete until the final phrase or clause. It uses suspension, parallelism, balance and climax.” Flynn’s style is periodic because he often modifies his sentences. He leads his reader through a series of other sentences that are merely additions to his first sentence and ends a paragraph dramatically.

Flynn will often write on sentence and then double back to embellish or correct it. This type of sentence structure is seen prominently in the first chapter when he is talking about seeing his daughter in sonogram pictures and also in “god’s loneliness (known)” when he is discussing his father.

Soon – very soon – I shall be known: these are the first words my father, locked up for robbing banks, or something like robbing banks, wrote me. His return address was #9567328, Federal Prison, Springfield, Missouri. I often hear myself calling him a bankrobber, perhaps because the word “bank robber” has more electricity in it than “fuckup”. His charge was “interstate transportation of stolen securities” – he’d entered a few banks and said a few words and passed a few bad checks and left with money that wasn’t his. In every bank he’d been photographed, smiling into the camera. Soon – very soon – I shall be known. Known? What else did anyone need to know?

(pg. 60)

Flynn’s style is very much “an event” as Lanham would say. In his textbook, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, Lanham writes that there are three traditional “levels” of style. The first is basic description, the third is more prose, the second is a blend of the two. Flynn never writes an event with just description. He is constantly using periodic hypotaxis and falls into the “ornamental” category or “dignitas” of Lanham’s organization (which he forwards from Cicero and the Rhetorica Ad Herennium. “Dignitas” is the use of figures to tastefully embellish, which is a good definition for Flynn’s writing. He is embellishing through periodic structure, but it is not distasteful. His writing is not weighted down by his style and the reader is still able to easily progress from one sentence to another without much hesitation, except in the cases where the topic is heavy and may require more independent thought.

If Flynn still has a desire to be known, he has certainly become known. His works have received numerous accolades and his style is unique and easily recognized as his. He plays God with words and creates wondrous worlds of dichotomy that engages the reader on a mental and spiritual level.

The Power of Persuasion on the Prosecution and the Public: Exploring Sarah Burns’ Defense of the Central Park Five

Abstract:

The story of The Central Park Jogger attack in 1989 is wildly known. Immediately following the attack and rape of Trisha Meili, a group of minority teenagers who had been in the park were held for questioning. Of this group, five were ultimately accused of the attack and sentenced. In her narrative, The Central Park Five, Sarah Burns’ shifts the focus of the attack from the victim to the accused – Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, and Antron McCray – and persuades the reader of their innocence. I believe that I have effectively used evidence from the narrative, Nichols, and Lanham’s works to argue for Burns’ persuasiveness. I know I need to further simplify my argument as I have taken on a complex thesis and my paragraphs are weighted down with multiple proofs. If I was to expand upon this essay, I would include critiques from both literary and film critics instead of focusing solely on the narrative version of the story.

I pledge my word of honor that I have abided by the Washington College honor code while completing this assignment:
Rachel Ann West

“Innocent until proven guilty” is a phrase with which many people are familiar. Considered a “standard” of the United States justice system, it is commonly featured in newspapers, syndicated television crime dramas, and books. In her narrative, The Central Park Five, Sarah Burns takes this well-known standard and inverts it to read “Guilty until proven innocent”. She questions the societal constructs and stereotypes that often precede an accused into a court of law. At the heart of the story are five men who, as teenagers, were convicted of a brutal crime and served their sentences in full only to be exonerated years later when the evidence was reexamined and a single suspect (not one of the five originally convicted) confessed to the crime. As with every story, there are two sides. In this case, the sides are literally the defense and the prosecution. The evidence for the convictions originally seemed solid: DNA, hair samples, and videotaped confessions. Defense for the accused was limited and seemingly uninterested in proving the innocence of their clients. It is Burns’ arrangement of the five-act documentary structure, purposeful use of sectioning throughout her work, and even-tempered voice that persuades the reader and convinces them not only of the innocence of the accused, but also the guiltiness of stigma and mass media.
Arrangement is a key strategy for traditional orations, like those given in court, and written works alike. Both require a particular arrangement if they are to persuade their audience. In court cases, the lawyers typically start with an opening statement that addresses what the evidence will show, what is intended to be proven, introduces the speaker, and introduces the client. The goal is to be effective and set the scene without argument or confrontation (American Bar Association 3). In The Central Park Five, Burns writes in a voice that is not argumentative or confrontational. Her first chapter similar to an opening statement in that she introduces the subjects (or the “clients”) – Antron McCray, Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, and Raymond Santana. She takes the time to describe their childhoods and living situations prior to the 1989 Central Park Jogger attack. Choosing to focus the beginning of the novel on the subjects allows Burns to heavily appeal to the reader’s pathos. In most cases, children are seen as innocent and worthy of protection. Burns chooses to begin her novel with the accused as children so that the reader will instantly sympathize with them. This allows Burns to victimize the Central Park Five. Unlike Meili whose attack was physical, the aforementioned men were attacked mentally and emotionally. Following their arrests, they were separated from their families and held for hours in rooms for questioning. Burns makes the case throughout her narrative that the economic and social structures of the time made these boys second class citizens, so in a way they were already used to being singled out or separated. The first chapter in Burns’ narrative balances evidence and emotion, which as Bill Nichols writes in his textbook Introduction to Documentary, is where much of the power and appeal of documentary lies (66). Nichols also presents a very clear structure for the arrangement of documentary. He draws upon the traditional five-act structure of classic plays, but says this structure also helps to “advance a proposal, perspective, or argument instead of a story” (64). The five-act structure for documentaries is opening, clarification, concrete argument, refutation, and summation. It is this structure, Nichols says, that gives rhetoric a place to reason with “black/white, either/or frame such as right or wrong, true or false, guilty or innocent” (64).
Nichols is not wrong in his analysis of the structure of a documentary and the power that proper formation can bring to a rhetorical argument, but his main focus is how these principles apply to documentary film. Burns takes and expands upon this five-act structure in the narrative version of The Central Park Five. When written text is presented as in the case of Sarah Burns’ work, the arrangement or structure of the chapters and paragraphs can be just as critical to the persuasiveness of an author’s argument. One of the most persuasive aspects of Burns’ narrative is her reliance on pathos. This pathos is not only developed through her arrangement, but it is also evoked by Burns’ purposeful sectioning. Sectioning is the separating of particular pieces in a chapter usually by the addition of an extra space. This sectioning further complicates the narrative that the Central Park Five were not members of the overarching narrative of society as it was known. In the case of the powerful epilogue in the narrative, the double spaces between the short “follow-ups” on the men are purposefully included to show how separate their lives have become – not just from society, but from each other. They are living mostly quiet, private lives just trying to create a new life out of the ashes of the ones they had. This is also noticed in Burns’ desire to contrast the childhoods of the accused with the childhood of the victim. It has already been stated that she begins her narrative with the childhoods of the accused, but she recounts Trisha Meili’s childhood in chapter four, several chapters after delving into and providing detail on the childhoods of the accused. This provides a tangible separation of the accused and the victim for the reader.
As previously stated, Burns’ decision to start her narrative by portraying the men as children is used to elicit sympathy from the reader (or “jury”). As a society we tend to perceive children as innocent and desire to shelter them from harm. Despite appealing to her audience’s pathos and relying upon the instinct to protect children, Burns doesn’t raise her voice and doesn’t angrily defend the men she depicts as victims. Instead, throughout the narrative she maintains a calm, level voice. She relies heavily on what Nichols calls the “narrative voice” (56). The narrative voice tells a story that has a beginning, middle, and an end. It can comprise elements of poetic and rhetorical voice, but is more character driven. Nichols writes that the conflict in a narrative voice documentary can be from other characters or “more abstract sources” (57). While characters definitely contribute to the conflict in The Central Park Five, these conflicts are arising first from the backdrop of stigma. One of the instances where Burns’ voice could’ve been more outraged was in the places where she acknowledges the socio-economic stigmas that were thrust upon the boys. These stigmas transformed them into animals in the eyes of the public. However, by beginning her narrative with their childhoods, she is able to speak in a tone that is reminiscent of a concerned mother. If she had started her narrative with the accusations and arrests, she would have needed a much more firm voice to convince the reader of their innocence.
Some audiences can be quickly manipulated into believing one side of the story. Mass-media relies on manipulative techniques in order to quickly convince an audience of the “truth” of one side of a story. In the case of the Central Park Jogger, media played into and played up the stigmas that society was placing on the five accused. Like Burns, the media was playing into the pathos of their audience. They did this through the use of “artificial proof”. As Richard Lanham writes in his textbook A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, pathos through artificial proof puts “the audience in an appropriate mood, by playing on its feelings” (166). The headlines at the time of the attack and convictions labeled the minority teenagers as a “wolf pack” that enjoyed “wilding”. The images that these headlines evoked inspired fear in the majority white population of New York. Had it not been for Burns’ portrayal of the young men prior to the trial, the reader would not be able to look at these newspaper headlines and distance themselves from the propaganda that it was spewing. Burns’ humanization of the Central Park Five prior to the introduction of the headlines makes it possible for the reader to not be persuaded by the pathos of the media. This type of empathy is what Lanham calls “ethopoeia” (193). Ethopoeia relies on the reader’s ability to distance themselves from what is being presented about a subject and put themselves in the subject’s position.
            One critique of The Central Park Five is that Burns does not have the same ethopoeia towards Trisha Meili and takes an unnecessarily harsh approach to her. The same empathy that she is conjuring for the accused, she seems to be denying the victim. This lack of ethopoeia is noticed in places where Burns changes her arrangement. A noticeable place where Burns changes her arrangement and does not begin with a focus on the men is in the Epilogue. In fact, she starts with the victim. There is no doubt in the reader’s mind that the ordeal Meili suffered was real. Burns recounts Meili’s grueling rehabilitation, but she also mentions her promotion to Vice President at Salomon Brothers, advocacy, memoir publication, and public speaking career in almost a spiteful manner. Burns seems to criticize Meili for not discussing attack in more detail in her memoir, I Am The Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility. By the time Meili published her work, Matias Reyes had already confessed to her attack and rape. Burns grants Meili’s story six paragraphs in the epilogue. The most she writes about one of the men is four. These four are given to Antron McCray, the most private of the group. Following Meili’s paragraphs is sectioning in the form of a double space and then Burns begins with Korey Wise. What Burns seems to be implying is that in her memoir, Meili had a chance to extend the proverbial olive branch to the five men who had their lives stolen from them. She chose to forgo mentioning the attack and therefore does not contribute aid to the public exoneration that the men are still so desperately seeking. While the perception of an attack on Trisha Meili’s refusal to help clear the names of the Central Park Five publically is valid, it is Burns’ lack of strong emotion in her writing that fails to convict her of targeting Meili.
Another critical review of The Central Park Five is that Burns relies on the narrative voice, but does not give a clear ending. Nichols writes that narrative voice resolves the story (57), but Burns’ story remains open-ended. In the narrative the story is left unfinished, open to interpretation by the audience. Burns ends her epilogue stating that the portrayal of minority teenagers in the media as animals has continued since the Central Park Jogger case without remorse, which means that the media’s influence on court cases that involve minorities is still prevalent.
Despite the critiques, Burns’ account of the case is persuasive and does a justice to a side of the story that was never prominently featured. Due to her arrangement, her narrative voice is able to calmly tell the story while simultaneously creating a strong conviction within the reader to take action. She is able to convince the reader of the innocence of the accused and complicate the “truths” perpetuated by stereotypes in the media. This complication becomes a challenge the reader to take a stand against the injustice that permeates our society

 

Works Cited

Burns, Sarah. The Central Park Five. Vintage Books, 2011.

Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. University of California Press, 1991.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Indiana University Press, 2017.

“Effective Opening Statements .” Americanbar.org, American Bar Association , 2003,
apps.americanbar.org/labor/lel-aba-annual/papers/2003/mcwilliams.pdf.

 

Banging the Gavel on the Innocence of the Central Park Five by Exploring Sarah Burns’ Closing Argument

Your Honour. The jury. I want you to think back to when you were sixteen. Where did you live? What was your favorite food? Where did you go to school? Who was your best friend?… What did you do for fun?

_______________________________________________________________________________________

In my opinion, the above statement would have been strongly considered as an option for Sarah Burns’ closing argument in the Central Park Five case if she had been a defense lawyer. Burns takes a direct approach to her work and gives the reader unprecedented access into the lives of the accused. Unlike some of the lawyers who chose not to put their clients on the stand (like Antron McCray’s attorney) to be cross-examined and potentially disrupt the mounting “evidence” that the prosecution was entering into existence, Burns purposefully gives her readers complete information about the suspects.

Her arrangement for the argument of the men’s innocence is one of the most compelling aspects of her narrative. In his book Introduction to Documentary, Nichols writes of the importance of arrangement. He says that arrangement organizes the parts of a rhetorical speech so that they may have the “maximum effect”. One of the most intriguing aspects of arrangement is how it can be used to play upon the gray areas of society.

Ambiguity exists; black-and-white alternatives ignore much gray, and these films call our attention to the gray zone of uncertainty and complexity rather than to specific opinons or alternatives.

pg. 65-66
Nichols, Bill. Introduction ton Documentary. Indiana University Press, 2017.

In the case of the Central Park Five, this idea of black-and-white versus gray seems of paramount importance to Burns. The story becomes more than just a question of race and systematic oppression; it becomes a challenge to the reader to tear apart this “gray zone of uncertainty and complexity” in order to discover truth and then promote it. One of the ways in which she orchestrates her arrangement to accomplish this challenge is by focusing the story itself on the five accused and not the victim.

As I wrote in my proposed closing argument, Sarah Burns focuses heavily on the childhoods (or lack thereof) that the Central Park Five experienced. Her first chapter to the narrative is heavily saturated with details about their families and their home environments. In doing this she is drawing upon the reader’s pathos, encouraging them to recall their own childhoods and subsequently discover the stark discrepancies (or similarities). Throughout most of the work, the men are featured front and center. They are no longer ambiguous thugs and animals; they are humanized.

When it comes to arrangement, Nichols talks about a five-act structure. When applied to Burns’ work it would look something like this:

The Opening: Childhoods
A Clarification: The teenage boys are arrested and the media circus ensues
A Concrete Argument: The men were wrongfully convicted (conviction overturned after sentences were served) and are still victims of the system
A Refutation: Careful analysis of prosecutors evidence (videotaped confession, hair sample, DNA)
A Summation: The epilogue 

One noticeable place where Burns changes her arrangement and does not begin with a focus on the men is in the Epilogue. In fact she starts with the victim, Trisha Meili. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the ordeal Meili suffered was real. Burns recounts Meili’s grueling rehabilitation, but she also mentions her promotion to Vice President at Salomon Brothers, advocacy, memoir publication, and public speaking career. Burns almost seems to criticize Meili for not discussing attack in more detail in her memoir, I Am The Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility. By the time Meili published her work, Matias Reyes had already confessed to her attack and rape. What Burns seems to be implying is that in her memoir, Meili had a chance to extend the proverbial olive branch to the five men who had their lives stolen from them. She chose to forgo mentioning the attack.

Burns grants Meili’s story six paragraphs in the epilogue. The most she writes about one of the men is four. These four are given to Antron McCray, the most private of the group. Following Meili’s paragraphs is a double space and then Burns begins with Korey Wise. Throughout the recounting of this trial, it was Wise’s story that affected me the most. Being sixteen at the time of the attack, Wise was not protected by a juvenile status. He serves five more years than the other men, and he serves them in a maximum security adult prison. Mentally handicapped and hard of hearing, Korey attempts school while in prison but cannot get past his disabilities. Burns describes him as “frustrated and bitter… gentle and chivalrous” (pg. 208).

Nichols is not wrong in his analysis of the structure of a documentary. However when written text is presented as is the case of The Central Park Five, I find that the arrangement or structure of the chapters and paragraphs can be just as critical to an author’s argument. 

In the case of Burns’ powerful epilogue, the double spacing continues between the stories. My initial reading of the text made me think that Burns included these spacings purposefully to show how separate their lives have become – not just from society, but from each other. They are living mostly quiet, private lives just trying to create a new life out of the ashes of the ones they had.

---

My uncle asked me what I was reading last night as I was working on this blog post. When I said “The Central Park Five” he said, “Oh yeah. The guys that raped that woman.”

I wanted to “throw the book” at him.

Accounting for the Tri(viewing)angle

In chapter 4 of Introduction to Documentary by Bill Nichols, he explores the “three different stories” that intertwine in a documentary. These stories are the filmmaker’s, the film’s, and the audience’s. Nichols describes how a filmmaker, regardless of their on-screen presence in a documentary, has a background that must be considered by the audience. What is their experience with the subject matter? What are their intentions and motives? What is the social context in which the work was created?

While it may seem that the audience is supposed to interrogate the filmmaker (and/or author in the case of The Central Park Five), the filmmaker also has to account for the audience. Viewers often enter a film with preconceived ideas of how the film should be presented. They can be particularly critical of a film’s layout when they have experience with the subject matter and believe that the filmmaker should see the issues their way.

The last viewing angle is that of the film itself. The filmmaker must account for their own personal biases and the expectations of the audience, choosing whether or not to play into those biases and expectations or disregard them entirely. The audience must be critical of the filmmaker’s intent, but also what the documentary reveals about the world in which we live. A documentary can not be completely separated from its filmmaker, but the audience can analyze how well the film portrays the world they perceive.

Nichols writes,

Documentary films mount an effort to convince, persuade, or predispose us to a particular view of the world we have in common. Documentary not only activated our aesthetic awareness (unlike a strictly informational or training film) but also activates our social consciousness.

pg. 76
Nichols, Bill. Introduction ton Documentary. Indiana University Press, 2017.

This mounted effort is (mostly) accomplished in three approaches: Deliberative, Judicial/Historical, and Commemorative or Critical.

Nichols defines these approaches as:

Deliberative: To encourage or discourage, exhort or dissuade others on a course of public action usually in topical issues (such as social policy) rather than speculative or historical issues.

Judicial/Historical: Accusing or defending, justifying or criticizing previous actions, posing the question of guilt or innocence and validity. These documentaries examine the past to ask the question, “What really happened?”

Commemorative or Critical: Bestows praise or blame on others (typically a biography).

Nichols gives wonderful insight into the three viewing angles and three (main) approaches to documentary. Understanding the interactions between these viewpoints and these approaches is the key to critically analyzing documentaries.

A documentary that is a good example of accounting for the multiple viewpoints and approaches is Sarah Burns’ The Central Park Five. Burns accounts for both her viewpoint and the audience’s in her book. In 1989 when the Central Park Jogger case happened, Sarah Burns was seven years old and living on Long Island. In 2003, she was working as a researcher for civil rights lawyers involved “in a civil suit on behalf of Antron, Kevin, Korey, Yusef, and Raymond” (x). Burns writes that she was interested in learning how something like this (the conviction of the aforementioned) could have happened. Her close involvement with those related directly to the case could have turned into a bias for her. However, she takes into account the viewpoints of the media, police, and prosecution in order to play devil’s advocate. In doing so, she is opening the case up to those in the audience who believe they already know everything there is to know about the case and have chosen to side with the victim, Trisha Meili. Arguably, she could easily account for the film’s viewpoint because her father is American filmmaker and documentarian, Ken Burns.

Sarah Burns writes with both a deliberative and judicial approach to this case, challenging the notion that a documentary must fall into one category. Her judicial approach may be the easiest to discover and analyze because she is arguing for the innocence of the Central Park Five. Despite their convictions being overturned, the men had already served their sentences in full and are still viewed by many people as guilty. Burns is also being deliberative in using her platform to investigate the roles of mass media coverage, institutionalized racism, classism, and persuasive false narrative. In doing so, she is challenging the reader (viewer) to think for themselves and consider every angle before falling victim to any hype that is influenced by our culture. She uses the Central Park Five case as an example of what can happen and also of what shouldn’t happen.

In my last blog post, I contrasted Joan Didion’s Sentimental Journeys with Burns’ work. Didion began her narrative with Trisha Meili, but while Burns mentions Meili in her work it is not until chapter three that we are given her childhood background. Burns studied the childhoods of the five accused men in chapter one, yet she waits to describe Meili’s childhood. This artistic delay further perpetuates the distance between the victim and the accused that Burns is trying to highlight. It was a combination of differences (race, class) between Meili and The Five that ignited the media frenzy. Burns mentions that in the same week of the Central Park Jogger case, “there were twenty-eight other first degree rapes or attempted rapes that were reported in New York City” (67) and none of them received the same coverage as this case because of the races of those involved. The difference between victim and perpetrator were not stark enough to warrant mass media coverage.

Burns furthers her deliberative argument by delving into the history of inter-race crime. She describes the negative stereotypes that have been placed upon Latinos and African-Americans for centuries. The stereotypes have endured and become so accepted among the surrounding white population that our government officials will include them in their platform. Burns writes that those in position of power who could have advocated to have the evidence of the case examined thoroughly were indifferent to the truth. They “failed to illuminate the actual facts of the arrests, interrogations, and confessions, seeking to score political points rather than debate the merits of te case against the teenagers” (83).

Judicially, Burns is still trying to advocate for the accuseds’ innocence. Deliberately, she is trying to invoke a stirring in the viewer to help facilitate the social change so desperately needed in our society to prevent this kind of injustice from happening again. Burns is effective in her method, combining all viewpoints and two approaches to broadly but completely cover the case.

Central Nervous System Park

On April 19th, 1989, several people were attacked in New York City’s celebrated oasis, Central Park. One of the victims that night, Patricia “Trisha” Meili, was jogging when she was brutally attacked, raped, and sodomized. The case has come to be widely known as “The Central Park Jogger Case”. New Yorkers who were fearful of the recent escalation in crime and the spread of drugs found themselves enraptured with the story of the young, beautiful, upper-middle class white woman who was fighting for her life after being left to die in the park. Her initial request to remain nameless allowed her to become a symbol of the New York that was also barely breathing and struggling to survive.

Joan Didion, a celebrated American author known for her journalism and memoirs, wrote of the attack a year after the incident. Her piece titled “Sentimental Journeys” begins:

We know her story, and some of us, although not all of us, which was to become one of the story’s several equivocal aspects, know her name.

pg. 685
Didion, Joan. Sentimental Journeys. Knopf, 2006.

Her narrative goes on to examine those other equivocal aspects of the case in detail. These aspects include escalating racial tension, mass-media coverage, and the personification of Central Park. Didion argued that the arrests and convictions of five teenagers for Meili’s attack were spurred on by the surrounding socio-economic issues at the time.

Her narrative also takes on an interesting psychological perspective as she investigates the impact that the personification of Central Park, and New York City as a whole, had on the case. As she described the “stories” that make New York so unique, she also wrote in a way that convinces the reader that New York has a mind of its own. This mind requires an interplay of chemicals to keep balanced, much like the human brain.

Stories in which terrible crimes are inflicted on innocent victims, offering as they do a similarly sentimental reading of class differences and human suffering, a reading that promises both resolution and retribution, have long performed as the city’s endorphins, a built-in source of natural morphine working to blur the edges of real and to a great extent insoluble problems.

pg. 705
Didion, Joan. Sentimental Journeys. Knopf, 2006.

In her account of the case, Didion seemed to be getting close to uncovering the root of the problem in the justice system that caused five young men to be wrongfully jailed for a crime they did not commit. However, she chose to start her narrative with the victim which, in a way, only serves to perpetuate the canonical view of this crime.

It is not until Sarah Burns publishes her narrative on the same case that the focus starts to shift away from the jogger and onto the five innocent men who were sentenced for the crime. In the title of her work The Central Park Five, Burns quickly reminds the reader that it was never just about the “jogger” but equally about these “five” young men – teenagers – who also lost a large part of their innocence on that April night and in the aftermath.

Burns begins her preface discussing how she first learned of the case and spends the majority of the first chapter humanizing “The Central Park Five”. Although “The Central Park Jogger” became something of an idol for New Yorkers, she was still granted her humanity. “The Central Park Five” were reduced to animals and headlines considered them to be a “wolf pack” who enjoyed going out “wilding”. Burns uses the first chapter of her narrative to explore the individual lives of Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Yusef Salaam, and heavily appeals to the reader’s pathos as she describes their childhoods.

Unlike Didion, Burns begins her account not with the jogger, but with the five young men. More specifically, she begins with the overturn of their convictions:

On December 19, 2002, Justice Charles J. Tejada of the Supreme Court of the State of New York granted a motion to vacate the thirteen-year-old convictions in the in famous Central Park Jogger Case… The young men had already completed their sentences…

pg. ix
Burns, Sarah. The Central Park Five. Vintage Books, 2012.

While Burns and Didion both take stabs at similar aspects surrounding the case, Burns does more to give the five young men their own voice. Didion, poetically, personifies New York City and Central Park. Burns works more from a classic rhetorical perspective.

These two unique perspectives – the poetical and rhetorical – are both part of a larger context known as “voice”. In his textbook, Introduction to Documentary, Bill Nichols describes the different types of voice that authors and filmmakers give to their works. The poetic voice “usually speaks in indirect address and implies perspective on the world. It seldom advances an argument or tells a story primarily, though elements of both may be present” (56). Rhetorical voice “addresses issues for which there is no single solution… Neither science nor logic can provide a definitive answer. It is the task of the rhetorical voice to persuade us of possible answers to… open ended questions” (58).

Didion’s narrative was poetic in the sense that, as Nichols defined, it implied a perspective on the case but did not advance the argument that surrounded the case. It is important to remember that Didion was writing a year after the incident and therefore wrote more factually on the verdict. However, she also uses poetic elements to bring into context the media coverage, rising tension, and sensational connotations that Central Park evokes.

The rhetorical voice that Burns uses in The Central Park Five addresses the issue of the case and furthers the argument surrounding the lack of solutions when it comes to our justice system being impacted by media and racial tension. She states in the preface that the convictions were vacated because of new evidence but still argues the absurdity of the original verdict and the influence of surrounding factors on the case.

Evidence, in this case judicially approved evidence such as DNA, is what Aristotle considered to be inartistic or nonartifical proofs. Richard A. Lanham describes this and one other type of proof in his reference book A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. The second type of proof he references from Aristotle is artistic or artifical proof. Lanham lists logos as an artistic or artifical proof (166). Nichols forwards Lanham’s forwarding of Aristotle and includes these types of proof in a section titled “Invention” (pg. 58).

Both Didion and Burns did much to invent in their narratives by discovering these proofs. Didion uses more of the artistic proof in her poetic recount of the case while Burns studies the nonartifical proof. Both narratives are needed to give a full account of the case and each encourages the reader to draw logical conclusions…

… like the type of logical conclusion that was missing from the courtroom when the verdict was read.

(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/45/1d/f0/451df0d8e17e990c0414b58b0fadd98f.jpg)

Final Project: An Overlooked Life; The Man of Steel

Overlooked Life: Addiction and Creativity

The digital essay is a terrifyingly wonderful new media platform that serves to both enhance and preserve the traditional essay. As the essay continues to undergo changes, so too do the rhetorical strategies we have come to rely on in the traditional written form. While exploring the use of multimedia for this essay, I was interested to continue my work with the evolving definition of enargia. With images at the forefront of the digital essay, enargia and imageric text in general seem to be losing their place. I wanted to create a digital essay that used very little text in order to focus on the images themselves and preserve the integrity of the rhetorical strategies that rely on imagery and enargia.

I also wanted to use this piece to further continue the work I am doing for my father’s memory. I want to end the stigma of addiction that continues to follow his name around seven years after his death. I want to stop the negative talk from family members who can only recall his shortcomings. “He wasn’t a good husband.” “He wasn’t a good father.” “He wasn’t good.” Because, from a not “good” man came many good works – one of which was the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s Butterfly Pavilion.

The massive steel dome contains hundreds of delicate butterflies and I have found many poetic similarities between my father and his addiction and the butterflies and their steel encasement. The contrast of steel and butterflies, strength and fragility, is oddly representative of my father. He was a union sheet metal worker who exuded a tough persona, but he kept hidden his incredibly low self-esteem and bleeding heart. When people speak of my father, they most often speak of “the addict” him and they often overlook the brilliant mind that was caught behind the steel of addiction – like those butterflies behind the dome. He was trapped behind walls he could not break through in his own strength.

The lack of narrative voice was purposeful. I wanted my voice silenced, like my father’s was when it came to the grueling cycle of addiction he was wrung through. I wanted to incorporate stilled images (which will later morph into overlayed video for the final project) to also give the viewer a sense of stagnation. My father’s addiction robbed him of his life and ceased all of our dreams for a change for him. The instrumental version of “Annie’s Song” by John Denver was also carefully selected. In the lyrical version, Denver sings “You fill up my senses,” and I wanted to pull in references that bring home how all encompassing both addiction and creativity can be.

I also chose to do this essay digitally and explore all of its implications because my father, with his love of architecture, was always on the hunt for the “latest craze” He would have loved every aspect of the digital essay and he would have happily stood behind my work… except for when I compare him to a butterfly.