The Toxicity of Humanity’s Advancement: An Emotional Argument Robert Crumb, one of America’s most legendary cartoonists, and Joni Mitchell, the Canadian folk-rock singer-songwriter, collaborated on “A Short History of America”. While the short was composed of already published works; the combination of Crumb’s comic, “A Short History of America” and Mitchell’s song, “Yellow Taxi Cab” bombarded the senses of viewers everywhere with literary appeals. Emotional appeals were found in abundance through the visuals and the audio, these appeals further the particular argument this dynamic duo is perpetuating about the destruction of the environment in the way of progress. Firstly, even if the destruction of the world tends to be an already fairly …show more content…
The most potent emotional argument that Crumb creates is in the last image of his comic strip. This image not only embodies the damage our pollution has caused but also the complete urbanization of the piece of world that used to be abundant with life other than humans. This image is also captioned with a singular question, “what next?”. In this manner, this image reeks with the stench of improvement and contains an emotional argument against the calamity of modern innovation: It is inherently emotional because it takes the pride and joy of humanity and debunks it for what it truly has become: a conquest of woe. On the whole, “A Short History of America” uses emotional appeals to further the argument of destructive progress and it is accomplished through the visuals and audio in the short video. Whether it was purely the diction of the lyrics, the combination of the chorus and the progressive images of destruction, or even particular elements of the comic strip, Crumb and Mitchell create a matter-of-fact emotional argument of the toxicity of humanity’s