Race and Cops
On the issue of racial inequality as related to exercise of authority by law enforcement, Sanders turns to imagery to underline the issue. This is the same imagery that would be repeated many times on television in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Sanders published his book a year and a half before that incident:
“We should not tolerate a situation in which, if current trends continue, one in four black males born today can expect to spend time in prison dur- ing their lifetime or where young black males are nine times more likely to be killed by police officers than other Americans, while rates of police killings for Native American and Latino men are also disproportionately high. We must not accept a reality where, according to the Department of Justice, blacks were three times more likely to be searched during a traffic stop com- pared to white motorists.”
Paul Ryan, Oligarch Meat Puppet
Sanders holds particularly harsh views toward former Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. He has termed him the “flesh-and-blood representative of the oligarchy.” He then goes on to back up this claim through a litany of imagery revealing the extent to which Ryan is in fully in the clutches of super-rich Republican donors:
“his ideology is that of a right-wing extremist. He worked hard to repeal the Affordable Care Act and supported efforts to throw as many as 32 million Americans off the health insurance they currently have. He helped write the Republican tax bill, which provides massive tax breaks to corporate America and provides…83 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent. He has been one of the most aggressive members of Congress in trying to cut and privatize Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. There is virtually no federal program that benefits working families, the elderly, children, or the sick that Ryan would not cut.”
Climate Change
Sanders uses imagery to put the large, more abstract issue of “climate change” into a narrower perspective about economic impact and health issues that is more immediate and easily understood. Rather than focusing on the issue from the seemingly far away world of Amazon deforestation and melting glaciers in the Arctic, he presents an image of devastating impacts on a more personal level:
“the Florida media was full of stories about how the state was confronting a “toxic algae” crisis. These toxic outbreaks, exacerbated by climate change, were destroying the state’s beaches, threatening the tourism that fuels Florida’s economy, and driving hundreds of residents into hospitals because of respiratory illnesses…roads in South Florida that were flooded, even at low tide, because the sea was rising. Scientists predict, in fact, that if we continue down the path we are on, much of coastal Florida, including Miami, will be underwater by the end of the century.”
Parallel Rhetoric as Imagery
In conveying the inexplicable absurdity of Trump “winning” the election and the combined sense of outrage and confusion it produced, Sanders turns to several literary devices which he combines to create an overall pattern of imagery. Parallelism and rhetorical questions serve to intensity the extent of the absurdity of the outcome:
“half the country obsessed over how Trump had won…How could someone who had run a hateful, racist, xenophobic campaign be elected president of the United States? How could someone who was seen on video boasting about his assaults on women be elected president of the United States? How could someone who had been involved in more than 3,000 lawsuits in his business career be elected president of the United States? How could someone who lied over and over again in the most shameful manner be elected president of the United States? How could someone who had little interest in or knowledge of public policy be elected president of the United States?”
