Elements of satire:
Parody: What is it imitating and/or exaggerating?
Mockingly serious tone::What are some examples that create the tone? (Inflated diction choices, industry/professional jargon, expert testimony, Facts interspersed with the exaggerated information)
Hyperbole: What is exaggerated?
Tone Shift: At what point do they “push it over the edge”?
What is the purpose of the piece? To call attention to a problem in society? To stimulate critical thinking about yourself and the current state of your own culture? To initiate change?
Annotate. Explain what it is that the author is trying to call your attention to or change.Read the Following Articles. Using the list provided, annotate each article by underlining and labeling to identify the elements of Satire found in each article. .
Paleontology:More than 65 million years ago, a cataclysmic event drove a majority of the Earth's species into extinction, and tragically, wiped out the last of the dinosaurs long before bazookas could be invented and used on them.
According to Ernest Diffey, a fossil archivist at the American Museum of Natural History, a giant asteroid struck the earth in the late Cretaceous period, forever robbing scientists of valuable data concerning the effects powerful rocket launchers might have had on the largest land animals that ever lived.
"Over the years, we've learned a great deal about their physiology, their dietary habits, and even their migratory patterns," Diffey said. "Unfortunately, however, nothing in the fossil record can reveal what it would be like to blow apart the massive front leg of a charging diplodocus and then watch it crash violently to the ground, sending a spray of dirt and dinosaur blood several stories into the air." "There are so many questions that must remain unanswered," Diffey added. "Like what kind of blood-curdling shriek a pterodactyl would have made after being blasted out of the sky with an M20A1 Super Bazooka. It's truly a shame."
Diffey said that, while testing the effects of high-power incendiary devices on animals such as hippopotamuses and blue whales could provide some insight into the mystery of dinosaur detonation, these lines of inquiry have largely been abandoned as inadequate simulations.
"Advanced computer models can help us to a certain extent," Diffey said. "But it's still no substitute for controlled experiments in which researchers toss a half dozen fragmentary grenades into a pack of velociraptors, or send an entire herd of stampeding apatosauruses through an active minefield."
To many paleontologists, such as Richard Hollander of the University of Michigan, exploring the various ways dinosaurs might have been slaughtered with today's military technology is a vital area of study."It's part of human nature to wonder what it would be like to crash a fully fueled F-14 Tomcat into a 60-foot-long, razor-toothed spinosaurus and then eject just before impact to see the chunks of smoking flesh flying in all directions as one gently parachutes to the ground," Hollander said. "And it is a tremendous loss for science that we'll never be able to take one of the smaller ones, like maybe the epidexipteryx, and smash it into mush with a shovel."
"Or a golf club," added Hollander, shaking his head. "Or a chainsaw."
Industry: After centuries of chronic unemployment, millions of small children across the United Kingdom saw their lives drastically improve when the Industrial Revolution at long last provided them with steady factory work regardless of age, size, or experience.
"Before the turn of the 19th century, frail boys and girls had no choice but to sit at home all day, playing with their younger siblings, just watching as another empty, unproductive week passed them by," noted British scholar William Donnelley said. "Once the Industrial Revolution began, however, any child able to fit inside a narrow mining shaft, or reach deep within a malfunctioning textile press, could venture out into the world and find himself a job."
Added Donnelley, "It was a time of unprecedented opportunity for the nation's 5- to 9-year-olds."
According to records, the introduction of machine-based manufacturing provided a desperately needed solution to England's toddler-unemployment epidemic. Out-of-work children, many of whom had struggled since birth to earn any kind of wage at all, were now afforded the chance to work seven days a week, up to 19 hours a day, in such competitive industries as iron-smelting and steel-tempering.
Not only was finding employment easier than ever for countless preadolescents, but the generous overtime available to them allowed boys and girls to catch up on years of experience they had lost while learning how to walk, nurse, or, in some unfortunate cases, attend several months of school.
"As a child of the time, it must have felt wonderful to be able to go to bed at night, confident in the knowledge that a job as a coal-boy, furnace operator, or even bore-grinder machinist awaited you the next morning," historian Russell Black said. "The sense of satisfaction and well-being all those orphans must have experienced week in and week out—it's hard to imagine.""After all, there's nothing like a full-time job to help someone get back on his feet," Black continued. "Especially if he's lost one of them in a horrifying threshing accident."
Anthropology: With the groundbreaking development of "war" more than 7,000 years ago, mankind acquired a new tool that for the first time ever made it possible to definitively resolve conflicts of any kind.
"The concept of two groups charging at each other from opposite sides of a field until one group is too wounded or dead to continue fighting completely revolutionized the way in which humans settled disagreements," said Kip Levin, a military historian. "Without war, early nomadic tribes would not have been able to decide who got the last of dwindling resources, there would be no pope in Rome, and the United States would never have found a way to intervene in Vietnam and Iraq."
Added Levin, "It's hard to imagine what life was like before people had war to tell them who was right and who was wrong."
Many historians believe the breakthrough mediation strategy originated in the Fertile Crescent shortly after the dawn of civilization, spreading rapidly to become an immensely popular conflict-resolution method across the globe. Since that time, war has solved hundreds of problems, from waterway access to border disputes to the entirety of Polish history.
War has also been employed on occasion to resolve disagreements over peace and to ensure that the world remained a harmonious place untroubled by fear, hatred, or the threat of violence.
According to Levin, because of its near- perfect rate of success in the modern civilized world, war will likely remain in popular use for the foreseeable future.
"We've come a long way from hashing out our differences around a fire," Levin said. "With the long-range nuclear missile technology we possess today, I wouldn't be surprised if, in a few short years, war solves the problems of mankind once and for all."
Sports: The late 1940s and '50s saw a role reversal unprecedented in the history of sport, as African-Americans—once thought incapable of physically competing against whites—began dominating playing fields to such an extent that their athletic skills soon came to be seen as their only contribution to society.
"Blacks have no chance against whites on the baseball diamond. They simply don't have what it takes to make the effort," Boston Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey told The Boston Globe in April 1947, echoing the nation's sentiments as Jackie Robinson made his major-league debut.
But two months into the season, Yawkey gave a follow-up interview in which he once more crystallized the thoughts of white America, saying, "Well, naturally, Robinson is out there running faster, jumping higher, and hitting the ball farther. Blacks are, if nothing else, more athletically gifted than whites. Sports is what they're good at."
This changing viewpoint was soon echoed by notable sports figures, politicians, typical American citizens, Ku Klux Klan members, and University of Kentucky basketball coach Adolph Rupp, who for years had refused to recruit black players because of their alleged unsuitability for athletics. After losing the 1966 NCAA Championship game to an all-black Texas Western team, however, Rupp said that the loss didn't surprise him.
"Blacks have a clear physical advantage over whites because their years of slavery made them genetically stronger and more athletic," Rupp said after the 72-65 defeat. "But they'll never be great doctors and lawyers. They don't have the mental capacity for something like that."
"I'll put it this way," Rupp added. "We'll never see a black head coach, team owner, or president of the United States."
At the time, certain controversial figures also claimed that blacks tended to display a certain talent for music, although most of them admitted that said music was only palatable when interpreted by white American or British artists.