Do You Want Lies with That? Analysis

                Do You Want Lies with That? by Morgan Spurlock is an interesting article about the dangers of overconsumption. The first thing that jumps out at you in this article is the creativity right out of the gate it gets you hooked with creative and humorous piece about eating a book. The author does an excellent job of using humor to keep his audience interested and engaged. Not only that, he uses the humor to make a better argument. The author uses humor in a mocking tone to make fun of a variety of different things, but all with the purpose of making the thing he is mocking seem ridiculous to the reader. Another tool the author uses is examples. His major example is the smoking industry as it began to die in the United States. It fought to make smoking seem cool and safe to the people of America, but ultimately it failed. The problem was that everybody was consuming the smoking industries products and it was killing everyone so the responsibility had to be put on something. Instead of the people who bought cigarettes taking responsibility it was the companies that sold them the cigarettes. The author uses this to call out the ridiculousness of our over consumption and how we cannot just blame ourselves for what we do to us. He then goes on to make this example have a little bit less sting by admitting that to some degree we don’t have control because of the huge power that comes with advertising. This advertising has made us consume, consume, consume, and it’s getting out of proportion. Spurlock then brings in facts to his argument by stating shocking statistics about the amount of consuming the people of the United States does compared to every other country in the world. Takes these facts and then uses a bit of pathos to get his point across. He points out that all this consumption that we are doing isn’t actually making us happier people even though that’s what all the advertisements say. He finishes by just saying simply, “Americans are eating themselves to death” another dangerous form of overconsumption and something that is incredibly scary.