Summary Of Is This Kansas By Eula Biss

Arguments come in various of forms from verbal to writing to even using the silent treatment. During English class, we have examined many passages all with strong arguments and the author Eula Biss falls under that category. Throughout the passage, “Is This Kansas” by Biss, her argument is shown through imagery. Biss starts off her article by explaining what a typical night looks like at the University of Iowa. She explains, “The chanting on sorority lawns, the parades, the groups in matching T-shits that read ‘Pharmacy Bar Crawl ‘06’ or ‘Ted’s Birthday!’ The shivering girls hugging themselves and clicking down the street” all make the image of typical college students out having a good time. Biss then introduces what happened during Hurricane

In order to outline her argument, she used two vastly different groups of people during the same situations, college students and Hurricane Katrina victims. This is to help the audience see a clear difference between the groups and standards put on these people. Biss argues that college students just “drink their way through it” and go in with their life even though a major crisis happened in their city. These college students even looted some alcohol after the tornado came through. The city hushed it because a standard put on college students is to drink all day, every day no matter what. Biss argues that college students are morally corrupt because after the crisis they “seemed to view the damaged downtown as an amusement park” not as “neighbors helping neighbors” as Iowans like to put it. Biss argues her point with another example on harassment. She states, “frat boys in Iowa City harassed me as I walked past their houses” which she finds “to be significantly scarier than anywhere in New York” meaning that college students can do and get away with their carefree lifestyle just because they are college students. This is yet another argued standard put on

She states that the government and more aged people have different standards during their time of crisis. Instead of the looting being seen as just kids having fun, it was seen as either stealing or trying to stay alive. This is because “America suddenly became a moral nation” and put standards on these people as either “victims or villains”. It was seen as wrong for people to be stealing TV sets or alcohol during the hurricane because the standard on the hurricane victims was to be moral and only loot what was needed. These standards, in the mind of Biss, should remain the same no matter if the victim or villain is a college student or a person affected by Hurricane