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Barbara Ehrenreich is a political essayist and social critic who is brave enough to tackle the most burning issues of modern society in her books and magazine articles. The problem of capital punishment is one of the issues that get the author’s thorough investigation. Being rather controversial, this problem does not stop invoking people’s desire to solve it: is it ethical and reasonable to deprive of life of those who dared to step over the borderline between human principles and animal instincts to kill, or is capital punishment one more link in the chain of murders?
In her essay Dirty Laundry: Benetton’s ‘We, on Death Row’ Campaign (Summer, 2000), Barbara Ehrenreich dwells on the Benetton campaign against the death penalty and the execution of a criminal known as Young Elk. The controversial nature of the problem discussed seems to have encouraged the author to choose the same strategy of presenting her views on it.
The thing is that at first sight, understanding the author’s argument presents some difficulty to the reader. In the beginning, it seems that the author is in two minds about capital punishment, but this assumption is a rather deceptive one. The hesitation arises because of the complex nature of the argument the author builds. Barbara makes a complex argument against the death penalty and the well-known company’s anti-death penalty advertising campaign. Other questions that the essay under consideration raises are the politics of consumption and advertising ethics.
We believe that reading Ehrenreich’s essay presupposes some background knowledge of the reader on Benetton’s We, on Death Row Campaign. At the beginning of 2000, Benetton launched a campaign about the death penalty. The company revealed the faces of the prisoners on death row with the purpose to remind everyone that the debate about capital punishment concerns not some virtual characters but real men and women, in flesh and blood; the problem is not that distant as might seem from the news that occasionally appears on radio and TV, this problem concerns everyone – staying indifferent means living a life of parasite caring just of one’s one needs.
The author’s focus on this campaign helped her to reveal her attitude to capital punishment. Throughout the essay, we can find a lot of supporting arguments that she uses to express her opinion. Giving a bright description of the portraits of the condemned people, Ehrenreich thinks about the certainty of their future and makes the reader look into their eyes: who are all those people- killers or victims themselves? The author concentrates mainly on the photos provided by Benetton but not on the interviews that accompany them. She says that she cannot but wonder while reading the interviews: “guilty or innocent?” but admits that the answer can be found in the faces of the inmates rather than in the interviews:
… it’s hard not to read the accompanying interviews without wondering “guilty or innocent?”-not that the interviews, which are a lot about loneliness and what it sounds like in prison at night, offer any answers to that (Ehrenreich 24).
Further, the author states that the inmates’ faces say that violence is not a singular event. It is always a chain.
It began, in these cases, with a childhood of neglect and abuse; moves on to legally recognized crimes; then feeds itself further on the cruelty of imprisonment and capital punishment. One act of violence cannot cancel another; it can only propagate the chain. Capital punishment is just one more link, and a crucial one, because it draws so many more people into the cycle of violence-those who pay for the execution with their tax money, which is almost all of us, and those who fail to raise their voices in protest (Ehrenreich 24).
As it is seen from these lines, the author claims that children learn by example. Therefore, it is in adults’ interest to care for the environment that they can offer them. If children are brought up in violent surroundings, they are most likely to become cruel as their adults. The death penalty is just the catalyst of this violence; it involves more and more people in the cycle of violence.
Ehrenreich concludes her essay saying:
Maybe Young Elk’s spirit will manifest itself above the fortress of San Quentin, clean at last and ready to redeem us. Maybe the victims’ relatives, who are inside right now watching him twitch as the poison enters his veins, will find peace now and even a wisp of forgiveness in their hearts (Ehrenreich 26).
On the one hand, these lines stress the controversy of the problem of capital punishment. On the other, the reader realizes that the author does not believe that the death of the killer will bring relief to the victims’ families. She does not seem to be sure that the execution of the guilty person will prevent potential killers from squeezing off. On the contrary, more violence will bring more violence. And corporal punishment does not contribute to breaking the vicious circle.
The author’s attack on capital punishment goes along with revealing the truth, as she thinks, factors that stimulated Benetton to launch the campaign. The author says that
the Benetton campaign is a classic example of what is known in the marketing business as “branding”: attaching to one’s product a sensibility that, it is hoped, consumers will want to acquire for themselves. (Ehrenreich 23)
According to Ehrenreich, the company’s marketing strategies were skillfully masked by the discussion of the hot-debatable issue. We believe that this is the author’s subjective view on the problem, and it can be differently perceived by the readers. Our position is that even if the company disguised its real intentions, the tool that they resorted to succeeded in attracting everyone’s attention to the burning issue of capital punishment. We do realize that the campaign did not solve the existing problem, but neglecting it would never lead to it, as well.
We cannot but admit the style that the author has chosen to address her reader. Thought-provoking, sometimes rhetorical sentences, emphatic phrases, directly addressing the reader, first-person narrative, simple language that the author uses – this all contributes to a better understanding of her message. Resorting to the symbol of the cross as a symbol of Jesus’s punishment, reminding the Aztecs and the Romans’ traditions of execution make her work more emphatic and persuasive.
The author grasps the reader’s attention from the very beginning of her story and keeps the reader in suspense up to the very end. Even the most indifferent reader cannot neglect the author’s call to decide on one’s attitude to capital punishment. And even if their view on the problem contradicts the one that Ehrenreich presented in her essay, one is thankful for being involved in the debate about the punishment of death.
Thus, we can conclude that in her Dirty Laundry: Benetton’s ‘We, on Death Row’ Campaign, Ehrenreich suggests her view on one of the most debatable problems of contemporary society. Through the use of bright images, appropriate tone, wording, and examples, the author did not simply state that capital punishment would contribute to the reign of violence in the world, but that well-known brands often manipulate the public’s attention to achieve one’s own goals. Even if we do not share the author’s position, we do believe that works like Dirty Laundry: Benetton’s ‘We, on Death Row’ Campaign contribute to finding the most reasonable solution to the problem that modern society faces.
Works Cited
Ehrenreich, Barbara. “Dirty Laundry: Benetton’s ‘We, on Death Row’ Campaign,” Aperture 160 (2000): 22-26.
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