TOW #20: Visual Text: Minimum Wage Raise

Goals: I hope to pick out a challenging and intriguing cartoon as my visual text.

I want this cartoon to be controversial and have rhetorical devices that can help me identify the purpose.

I also want it to be on a topic that I am passionate about.

I want this TOW to flow and be more like a short essay rather than just a small blogpost.

I also don’t want to list the requirements for the TOW, but make them sound more natural.

Earlier this year, President Barack Obama gave the State of the Union Address. Typically, the President of the United States delivers this address annually. In his address, President Barack Obama announced that he would like to raise this minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 an hour. This has caused a lot of controversy, especially amongst the Republicans. In a current political cartoon, Khalil Bendib, an Algerian artist and political cartoonist, illustrates the Republican point of view on the proposed minimum wage raise in order to show America the Republican's view how ineffective raising the minimum wage would be. Bendib is trying to appeal to the American public in order to make them realize the negatives that the minimum wage boost would bring.

When looking at the cartoon, the first thing that catches the eye are the elephant in suits. All these elephants look distraught in order to symbolize how awful raising the minimum wage would be. The elephant is actually the Republican symbol and when looking closely, one of the elephants has the acronym "GOP" written on his pant leg. This stands for "Grand Old Party" which is otherwise known as the Republican party. All four of these elephant are bringing up issues with Obama advocating to raise the minimum wage. One of them talks about how raising the minimum wage has been done before and this immediately questions the intended affect of the minimum wage boost because if the minimum wage has been raised before and still there were problems in the economy, this makes the American Public question whether raising the minimum wage is really effective or not. 

The second elephant talks about how the minimum wage should be less, not more. This is appealing to the logic of the Republican point of view because they highly disagree with raising the minimum rage and if logically thinking, minimum wage really is less not more. This makes the American public realize yet another fault with the raise of the minimum wage.

The third elephant really hits close to home for a lot of America's people because it says that money isn't the reward, jobs are. This appeals to the emotions of the audience because a lot of people in the United States are currently unemployed and raising the minimum wage would actually cause unemployment to go up so looking at this cartoon, people are going to understand that raising the minimum wage is really not a good thing. 

Finally, the last elephant is just a racist attempt of the Republicans to target the President. This mainly has to do with the fact that they believe that he is not a good president and implementing the boost of the minimum wage is a horrible idea. 

When looking at the speech bubbles, one notices that some words are specifically bolded. I think that the author did this in order to show the strong contempt of the Republicans against raising the minimum wage. Also, I think this was done in order to highlight the issues that raising the minimum wage would bring.

Personally, I thought that this was a really effective cartoon not only from a biased point of view, but because it had a lot of symbolism, while also including the actual issues that raising the minimum wage would bring. It did not merely just list all of them, but they were short- paraphrased issues that could be clearly understood not just from the Republican point of view, but anyone in the American public can look at this cartoon and understand the downfall of raising the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage is the product of a bad idea with good intentions.