"McCan"

This essay was quite the lengthy one but didn't struggle to keep my attention as much as I thought. Could it be perhaps the fact that Wallace was fire talker that up front referred to my generation as uninformed, naive when it comes to politics? Could be. Or maybe it's the fact that his first paragraph was "Who Cares," I don't know, but Wallace had my attention. You know that feeling that you get when someone tells you, "You don't know nothing," and so you get flustered and you are immediately drawn into whatever it is that they tell you don’t know. Well that was exactly the effect taking place here and might I say, it worked.

In the beginning first few paragraphs of this essay Wallace states a clearly defined audience which was 18 to 35 year old Rolling Stone readers and then he continues on to call them out on their lack of knowledge and suggest that they will probably not even finish the article once they find out what it’s really about. I found this strategy to be quite effective, because it’s almost as if this becomes a game and you want to finish it just to show this seemingly arrogant jerk who’s right and who’s wrong. Nevertheless, the read becomes quickly interesting. Wallace begins to talk about the strategies that McCain used in furthering his campaign and attempted to further explain what many of us, or at least what I didn’t know, about this candidate.

One of the biggest points that I believe Wallace touches on relatively early would be McCain’s lack of self-interest and his trustworthiness, per se, because of it. This is something that I didn’t quite realize and never actually knew was a huge campaign strategy utilized by McCain. I knew he was a vet but when Wallace goes into detail about what exactly McCain went through, this to me showed great courage and at the same time much like the article said, made me wonder was this guy noble or insane?

This lends way to another rhetorical strategy when examining McCain’s torturous past, the ability to relate to the audience. Now wait, let me finish. This generation, the generation that Wallace points out is his audience has a “thing” for gore. Take for instance the popularity of such movies like “SAW” and the fact that we have become desensitized to much violence because of what we are exposed to in the media. Well, when Wallace begins to recap this moment in McCain’s life I can’t help but think gore and sadly enough I kept reading because I just had to know what happened. Did they hurt him more? Try to kill him? Or what other torturous things did they try to do this man, AND he survived. We must not forget he survived. That’s the kicker behind all the violence, the fact that this man suffered through this pain and voluntarily suffered four more years and lived.

However, McCain honestly seemed doomed in my eyes when looking back at this election. The new generation although, “uninformed,” is among the least prejudice, therefore giving way for Obama to work his magic. Although yes, presidential credentials and statistics mattered but, just like Wallace said stats weren’t checked too often by my group. The race issue was at the heart of this election and although McCain was noble or insane whichever you prefer, it still didn’t justify the fact that he was against some of the very ideas the new generation has come to love and accept, and let’s face it, as we all know Americans were ready to see some change. So this article did a great job at informing. I personally thought it was going to slay McCain’s campaign in the first few pages there but later learned it was actually informing an audience like me on the things I didn’t know, and didn’t care to find out, and actually left me with a greater knowledge and more respect for McCain, or as they named him in Hanoi McCan.