Essay about Account on Mandelbaum

Essay about Account on Mandelbaum Essay about Account on Mandelbaum Zacharia Fouda Professor Harris RWS 100 9/25/12 Account to Mandelbaum Every country in the world experiences a way of expressing their physical activities in sports. Most commonly in the world, football (soccer) is generally the religion of many. This is not the case in America. The Americans are more focused on the sports they have invented, such as American football, basketball, and baseball. In the first chapter of his book, â€Å"A Variety of Religious Experiences† in â€Å"The Meaning of Sports,† Mandelbaum explains to you what these sports are like in America and how these sports affect the people as a general populace. Mandelbaum uses rhetorical tools such as ethos, pathos, and logos to enhance how well he delivers his points. In this essay, I will talk about how his rhetorical tools affect his arguments. Mandelbaum’s argument is more focused on presenting the information in a way to educate you. Most of what he says in the passage is generally researched information that you have to take his word for. I could have gone and searched them myself on Google, but Mandelbaum comes off as a guy that knows what he’s talking about, and it’s not like he made research to write these facts, it’s as if he just knows it off of the top of his head. â€Å"The industrial revolution brought to the United States and to the world modern methods of transportation, and on these, too, the emergence of team sports depended,† (Mandelbaum, 40) you can’t help but think that he lived through this and he realized what was going on. Americans adore sports and it’s something they take to the grave. It is a very logical point that it is a form of escapism, and returning to the blissful, childhood past that is when you played sports as a child as an implied insight on the subject. The rest is to be taken based off of Mandelbaum’s heavy reliance on his ethos here. According to Mandelbaum, nowadays, sports help with one of the most primitive needs as a human, the spiritual needs and the needs of the psyche. (42) The information is set up as a â€Å"take it or leave it† sort of situation for the reader, it is up to the reader to decide if his ethos is sufficient to believe his claims. Mandelbaum connects baseball, football, and basketball as a way to one’s past as a form of pathos. In my opinion, this is a phenominal explanation but the pathos isn’t exactly obvious since one must delve into what he actually meant. When humans are children, a huge part of their life is to play a sport. They will most likely join a team and carry it with them for the rest of their lives and that will always be the sport that they played. When that child, as an adult starts to play that game again, they will reminisce about the times they p layed the sport as a child. They will remember that baseball championship final and when he stood there with his bat, his heart beating and the way he got 3 strikes out and blew the game. Generally, it could have gone as a success or a disaster and either way he’s going to remember it because he is playing baseball. Mandelbaum states that â€Å"the word sport is related to â€Å"disport†- to divert oneself. Baseball, football, and basketball divert spectators from the burdens of normal existence,† (41) this supports his argument tremendously since it solidifies the effect of his pathos argument. He describes it as a religious experience, as if people take a mental pilgrimage into their soul. Since most of this piece of writing is focusing on logos to argue more, I think this is as pathos as it’s going to get. This is the one argument that can appeal to one’s emotion. It isn’t a bad one since anyone that plays sports can relate to it. As for the more sophisticated people, he relates this to the Odyssey with the team being the protagonist, facing many challenges to achieve a goal, and getting through those challenges (41) cause you to reminisce on how you did it. Most of the rest of his arguments are more realistic. He states that the feats you see in a