Journal Entry

Peace Little Girl (Daisy)

The rhetoric I have chosen for my first journal piece is one of the most controversial political commercials in history. I have included a transcript here, but if you have a media player I strongly recommend that you click the link and choose the Peace Little Girl (Daisy) thumbnail (it is the second from the top in the left hand column). The sounds and images are essential to really understanding the impact of this commercial. Some of you may have seen it before, or heard about it. The commercial was only run once on television and then pulled because it had such a profound effect on television audiences.

Peace Little Girl (Daisy)

Click Here For Daisy Commercial

Transcript:
SMALL CHILD [with flower]: One, two, three, four, five, seven, six, six, eight, nine, nine ....

MAN: Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero.

[Sounds of exploding bomb.]

JOHNSON: These are the stakes: To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the darkness. We must either love each other, or we must die.

ANNOUNCER: Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.


Analysis:
The commercial begins with the innocent voice of a little girl struggling to count the petals of a daisy. She sits in nature with the sounds of birds chirping in the background. Then a male voice overpowers the littlle girl in a different kind of countdown as the camera zooms into the eye of the little girl to reveal an explosion.

The statement made by Johnson represents a tacit persuasion pattern. Isocolons are structured in an either/or pattern:

to make a world in which all of God's children can live
we must love each other

or

to go into the darkness
we must die

The announcer's statement (voiced over a black background with the phrase "vote for President Johnson on November 3rd ") represents the directive. According to Lanham, this simple phrase would reflect high style because it is serious, dramatic, and emotional.

As a matter of fact, the whole commercial represents a high style. The drama of the mushroom cloud, the emotional draw of the child juxtaposed to the dramatic countdown is meant to be persuasive from a pathos perspective. There is no logic in the argument; it functions on fear. It isn't surprising that this commercial is considered one of the first mudslinging commercials in television history. The implication that a vote for Goldwater means certain death is a pretty serious accusation.

How to make a link to a web site

When you click on "Leave Your Comment" in the text box to enter your information, if you would like to make a link to another web site (i.e. for your rhetorical journal) simply copy the web address and add an html link tag which looks like this:

<A HREF="http://www.google.com">Click Here For Google</A>
Note: in this example we are using the web address for google. The information around the web address is what creates a clickable link. It includes the less than symbol (<), the syntax A= HREF, and the greater than symbol (>) followed by the web address and ended with the less than symbol (<), a slash (/), the letter A, and the greater than symbol (>).

Here's What's Happening

A stands for Anchor. It begins the link to another page.

HREF stands for Hypertext REFerence. That's a nice, short way of saying to the browser, "This is where the link is going to go."

http://www.google.com is the FULL ADDRESS of the link. Also notice that the address has an equal sign in front of it and is enclosed in quotes. Why? Because it's an attribute of the Anchor tag, a command inside of a command.

Where it reads "Click Here For Google" is where you write the text you want to appear on the page. What is in that space will appear on the page for the viewer to click. So, write something that denotes the link.

/A ends the entire link command.