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The Plastic Pink Flamingo Analysis

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The United States is well known for being a melting pot of cultures, and because of this there are constantly changing trends. In the 1980s it was poofy hair and disco clothes, in the early 2000s it was long hair for guys, and in recent years it has been for guys to have short, styled hair. There is always something trendy in the United States, and in the early to mid 20th century, it was the color pink and the (pink) flamingo. Jennifer Price details this in her essay ”The Plastic Pink Flamingo”. Through her use of satirical devices, Aristotelian appeals, and persuasive techniques she shows how the country is constantly going through fazes. The pink flamingo’s rise to fame came courteous of the Flamingo hotel in Miami, Florida, and the casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. They were so successful largely due to the flamingo being the color pink, which was their “claim to boldness” (Price), and being bold is very important in extravagant cities such as Miami and Las Vegas. Throughout her essay Price is effectively able to show the influence that the color pink had on the country by using satirical devices, mainly repetition. She repeats the work several different times throughout the essay, in different contexts, mainly in the third paragraph. She gives examples of the influence that …show more content…

The largest example of this relating to the pink flamingo would be the immense popularity if the Flamingo hotel in Miami. “Americans had been flocking to Florida and returning home with flamingo souvenirs” (Price). While there were surely many other similar hotels to the Flamingo, and surely some of them would have been more moderately priced, people still chose the Flamingo because of the extravagance surrounding it, and, mainly, because so many others were doing

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In a recent essay by Jennifer Price “The Plastic Pink Flamingo: A Natural History,” her use of irony, juxtaposition, and exemplification reveals her views on American culture in saying that it is too preoccupied with image and money rather than appreciating the beauty of the culture itself. In paragraph two of her article, Price uses strong juxtaposition. She juxtaposes the desert and a lawn by saying, “... conjured from the desert in 1946… even more strikingly than on a lawn.” This gives the audience a picture of how a pink plastic flamingo stands out more in a secluded desert than on someone's front lawn.

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Further, Price directly relates Americans and the flamingo together by using the terms “flocking” and “splashing”. Her shift in tone relates to the feeling of simplistic values being overlooked by the egotistical aspects of modern-day society.

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In Prices first paragraph she starts with “first it was a flamingo” the sarcasm is pretty obvious, but her sarcastic tone shows that Americans took a simple item such as the flamingo to build an obsession. Price is able to draw attention the the irony when she discusses the hunting and extinction of flamingos but after draws attention how the Americans used the flamingo as a symbol of fortune and became a popular trend, especially in already-flamboyant places of the previous decade like Las Vegas. Price seems to be supporting this trend, but she is actually pointing out the ignorance of Americans. When Price talks about the extinction of flamingos and says “but no matter”, it represents the mentality of Americans during this time because americans didn’t know the history of flamingos in the U.S. and practically didn’t care because they continued using it for their own good. She later states a rhetorical question about why Americans emphasized the words “Pink Flamingo”.

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