“the American Dream, Supersized” Rhetorical Analysis

The author exemplifies the disappointment in “The American Dream, Supersized” with the movement away from pure values and goals, like freedom, less favorable materialistic ambitions. The author uses strategies like sarcasm, anecdote, and irony to explain why America has become more a more supersized nation. He used sarcasm to demonstrate how the work ethics have been changed and to explain what people did not want. An example of this is when the immigrants started to say what they want their children to become and it so happens to be that the jobs they said are ones that pay good money. “Would that my great-grandson grows up to become a professional poker player.”
A further example has to do with anecdote because the author really wants to emphasize on how America has been ‘supersized’; the school bus had broken during the field trip, so they replaced the bus with a limo. Another example of an anecdote is when one of the immigrants says, “Damn, I thought the streets would be paved with iPods.”
Nevertheless, irony affects how one does not appreciate the entire experience of whatever one is doing or where ever one is. It is how the father’s expectation of the field trip was that she would’ve learned about her ancestors and how life was in the past, but in return the daughter said that the best part of the field trip was watching The Simpsons in the limo. Euphemism is which is also applied when one of the immigrants said that he wanted his child to become rich by injecting ‘poison’ into people’s faces. They used the word poison instead of Botox because they wanted to emphasize on how Americans are living today with a bit sense of humor. The daughter at the dinner table shows apathy because she is slouched over illustrating that she is a very uninteresting person and that she was not excited about the field trip at all.
Handy and Sweeny proves, in their opinion, how America has supersized itself to become an outrageous nation. Outrageous in a sense of out of control and losing the bigger picture of America, which is the land of opportunity. They accomplish this by painting a comic with different strategies to get their overall message to the reader: how America has been sailing away from its pure values of freedom and work ethics.
Work Cited
Handy, Bruce, and Glynis Sweeny. "The American Dream, Supersized." TIME 29 May 2006: 78.

Cited: Handy, Bruce, and Glynis Sweeny. "The American Dream, Supersized." TIME 29 May 2006: 78.