wow, you must REALLY be bored if you want to read this
Appeal to Emotion for a Weak Argument
Kunstler, in his book, City in Mind, attempts to analyze certain cities and explain why they are working and why they are not. Paris is a successful city because its leaders reconstructed the city logically. Atlanta is not because it is becoming decentralized. Mexico City is not successful either because it is so overrun with crime and pollution that its citizens are barely at the first stage of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Kunstler’s method of proving his point makes his otherwise valid argument invalid. By overwhelming the reader with pages of irrelevant historical context, he attempts to manipulate the reader. There is no correlation between what happened at the decline of ancient culture and the modern culture of today – and manipulative fallacies employed by the author to provoke emotional response will not make it so. Roughly twenty pages of “Mexico City” is devoted to the city’s bloody past. For most of the twenty pages, emphasis is placed on one important aspect of Aztec culture – the human sacrifice. There is nothing wrong, argumentatively, with exploring important aspects of a culture. He does this in the Atlanta chapter with the Atlanta citizen’s extreme fear and prejudice and support of automotive culture. He explores Atlanta’s culture not in as much depth as Mexico’s city (eating flesh and tearing hearts out of live bodies does make much more interesting reading) but it supports rather than diminishes his argument on Atlanta. Kunstler relies on the reader’s emotion instead of an analytical argument to make the connection between past and present. An appeal to emotion may be beneficial in junction with another rhetorical strategy, as in Frank’s acidic diction in “A Machine for Forgetting.” Frank’s obvious bias was paired with facts and analysis was done. Kunstler’s emotional appeal was not.
Instead of explaining specific milestones in civic and political events that led to Mexico City’s “tipping point,” (as he did in Paris and Atlanta) Kunstler focuses on the city’s bloody past. He gives the reader an irrelevant, lengthy history session so that he could allude to it in the last ten pages of his chapter. Creatively, this might be an interesting approach. However, the rest of City in Mind is written from a didactic analytical perspective. This sudden change to interpretational non-fiction can be viewed as an unsupported, flawed argument.
There are twenty pages worth of ancient bloodshed before the ten pages of modern day Mexico city. In the twenty pages, he explains to the reader different reasoning for cannibalism. He name drops anthropologist Marvin Harris who states “that Aztec cannibalism was a ‘state-sponsored system geared to the …redistribution of substantial amounts of animal protein in the form of human flesh’”(88). Aside from being a government-sponsored nutritional program for its citizens, cannibalism was also an art form. “When Cortez and his men arrived…in Tenochtilan, they found a monumental rack of human skulls…on display…one hundred thousand heads” (89). Kunstler even offers the reader a psychoanalytical view on cannibalism and idol worship. He states Jaynes’ theory that the ancient mind does not recognize its own voice. That it believes that it is not the mind but a god that speaks to the man. The ancient mind eventually realizes that their idols are actually themselves and metaphorically and literally lose their minds in an orgy of human sacrifice (84-86). From an emotional standpoint, it makes perfect sense – Mexican ancestors were crazy cannibalistic sinful beings. Of course they would be robbing each other. From a logical standpoint, it can be understood that if there was a reason for Mexico’s demise that it would be something recent. Perhaps an indifferent government. Kunstler’s argument would have been stronger if he had filled the gap between ancient times and the modern day with historical context.
He subtly adds historical allusion in the last ten pages to continually remind the reader of the previous twenty pages of bloodshed. “The latest victim while I was there was a prosperous car dealer from the upper-class inner suburb of Coyoacan – once an Aztec satellite village, where Cortes lived just after the conquest” (102). Kunstler does not bother to explain the relevance of tying Cortez with the scene of the crime. It is supposed to spark a recollection of the bloodshed from the previous twenty pages and intensify the current crime of today. Logically thinking outside of the manipulative fallacies Kunstler uses, there is no correlation between what happened at the decline of ancient culture and the modern culture of today.
The main reason cultural evidence works in Atlanta and not in Mexico City is that his cultural evidence in Mexico is outdated. Right now, Atlanta has a self-destructive fetish for the suburb and the automobile. The Aztecs practiced cannibalism and this contributes to their downfall in the 20th century, somehow. What does this have to do with modern day Mexico City? Kunstler leaves the reader to make the connection. Have the Mexican people been unable to recover from their bloody past? Are they still trying to come to terms with the ancient revelation that their false idols aren’t real? Is there some kind of collective subconscious of violence imbedded in the Mexican mind? Suddenly, the reader is reading a post-modern speculative work on Mexico City instead of the non-fiction analysis that is present the remainder of the book.
Kunstler uses history to further the point that Mexico City is not functional. He does this by using history as a metaphor. Though interesting and descriptive, it does not serve any concrete purpose aside from shocking the reader into believing that Mexico’s violent past is effecting today. He gives the reader an irrelevant, lengthy history session so that he could allude to it in the last ten pages of his chapter. Creatively, this might be an interesting approach. However, the rest of City in Mind is written from a didactic analytical perspective. This sudden change to interpretational non-fiction can be viewed as an unsupported, flawed argument.
