Rhetorical Analysis Of Howard Zinn's Speech

Zinn’s speech shows a clear indication that he is confident in his own field and opinion. An example is when he openly criticizes Hollywood’s poor structure; “It’s a structure where money and profit are absolutely the first consideration: before art, before aesthetics, before human values” (2). He is brutally honest about his opinion on Hollywood’s capitalistic outlook. He claims that they do not focus on the true priorities that a movie should have and instead are only focused on making money rather than telling a good story. Hollywood only tells people what they want to hear rather than what they should hear to make them better people. Zinn also challenges historical figures that have been regarded as heroes in American history. Theodore Roosevelt is one of the figures that Zinn has the most problems with, “Have you ever seen a movie in which Theodore Roosevelt was presented as a racist? As an imperialist? As a supporter

An example is his statement on Fidel Castro, “We’ve never had anything against dictators” (14). This gives a problem of misinterpretation for the audience that comes from the fact that the speech is written down instead of being spoken. It is easy for an audience to be clueless on the fact that he uses “we” to talk about the United States instead of his opinion as well. Additionally, how Zinn concludes his speech is not well built up in the speech, “What we must do—whether we teach or write or make films—is educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world” (32). While his conclusion has a good message, it feels like it comes out of nowhere in the speech. There was no foreshadowing that Zinn would bring up a message like this. It could be fixed if he compared these events to events of the time, such as the Rwandan Genocide or asked the audience if they would do something similar to the events he