Pink Flamingo Essay (Jennifer Price)

Jennifer Price used her own style of rhetoric exceptionally well to demonstrate her own individual perspective on the United States. In her essay, “The Plastic Pink Flamingo: A Natural History”, Price compares such a minuscule object as a flamingo, with the vast widespread culture of the American society; clearly depicting how American culture was highly based off of the desire to be bold and in vogue with the rest of society. The flamingo lawn ornament created a spark to epidemic of materialistic viewpoints based off of bright, flashy, pink colors. The new pink trend that was engulfing the nation was influencing every aspect of the daily life. From cars to washing machines, and from famous people to famous places, the flamingo and especially the color pink alone were shaping the new American culture. Ironically, such an outbreak of vibrant and flamboyant colors that were now sweeping the nation, came about after the Depression; such a melancholy period of national devastation. Price’s essay has adeptly portrayed her standing on how American culture can be strongly influenced by materialistic and trending ideas, just by introducing the influence of a subjective object like the pink flamingo. The result of the influence of the plastic pink flamingo phenomenon, struck the American society with such a major impact that the culture as a whole began to shit from a dismal, dreary decade; to a bright, and jubilant era, that was overwhelming influenced by the color pink. One of the first major influences of the pink flamingo was in 1946, by a gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s hotel, in the middle of a vacant desert, that was conjured by an array of flamboyant colors and named The Flamingo Hotel. The popularity of the pink flamingo continued to grow with the adoption of the name “flamingo” by restaurants and lounges in order to create the allusion of such an elegant appeal that the famous Vegas hotel holds. The hotel, however, was not only the major influence towards