1. (Suggested time—40 minutes)
The passage below is an excerpt from Jennifer Price’s recent essay “The Plastic
Pink Flamingo: A Natural History.” The essay examines the popularity of the plastic
pink flamingo in the 1950s. Read the passage carefully. Then write an essay in which
you analyze how Price crafts the text to reveal her view of United States culture.
My essay:
In
the United States today, the pink flamingo is seen as something flashy, a
symbol of trashiness. However, this was not always the case. In her essay “The Plastic Pink
Flamingo” Jennifer Price analyzes how the pink flamingo came to such popularity
during the 1950’s and 60’s, and what it represents about American culture. She
shows in her essay the American penchant for flashiness and showing off one’s
wealth, as well as how Americans tend to take what already exists and improve
it, make it bigger, better, bolder. This essay effectively uses the classic
lawn ornament to demonstrate an interesting and well-illustrated view of
American culture.
Americans
stereotypically have a tendency to show off, demonstrate their power and
affluence in extravagant ways. This characteristic is aptly shown in the
popularity of the flamingo symbol and it’s evolution in American culture. In
the 1910’s Miami Beach opened up its first grand hotel: the Flamingo. This has
“made the bird synonymous with wealth and pizzazz”. From there, the pink
flamingo rapidly became a symbol for showcasing wealth and affluence in
extravagant and flashy ways. The symbol rapidly spread through the middle and
working classes, from modest hotels and restaurants themed around the snazzy
pink bird, to the famed plastic lawn ornament. Working class families “could
inscribe one’s lawn… with Florida’s cachet of leisure and extravagance”. The flamingo,
in all its tropical magnificence and glory, beautifully showcases the American
penchant for flashiness and showing off.
The
flamingo by itself, with its bright plumage and tropical feel, is quite a
beautiful species. However, “the pink flamingo is hotter than its natural
counterpart, and even a real flamingo is brighter than everything around it”.
This desire to improve, to make what is already bright and bold, brighter and
bolder, is shown not only in the plastic lawn ornament but also by nearly every
aspect of American culture. This can be seen in their extravagant hotels,
sumptuous meals, massive urban sprawls, and ever-improving technology. Perhaps
this is best demonstrated by the city of Las Vegas, the “flamboyant oasis” in
the middle of the Mojave Desert, famed for its extravagance and flashiness. It
shows how everything can be made better, grander and more splendid with the
right (or perhaps wrong) human touches. Bigger, better, brighter is a theme
that carries over into almost every aspect of American lifestyle, and the
flamingo is clearly no exception.
To
conclude, the history of the plastic pink flamingo displays key aspects of American
culture: the desire to showcase one’s wealth using the flashy and extravagant,
and the desire to improve, to make it bolder, more vivid and special. Despite
how it is perceived today, the plastic pink flamingo’s history shines a light
on these aspects of American culture, and is an undeniable symbol for the
American lifestyle.
Except (Jennifer Price)
When the pink flamingo splashed into the fifties
market, it staked two major claims to boldness. First,
it was a flamingo. Since the 1930s, vacationing
Americans had been flocking to Florida and returning
home with flamingo souvenirs. In the 1910s and
1920s, Miami Beach’s first grand hotel, the Flamingo,
had made the bird synonymous with wealth and
pizzazz. . . . [Later], developers built hundreds of
more modest hotels to cater to an eager middle class
served by new train lines—and in South Beach,
especially, architects employed the playful Art Deco
style, replete with bright pinks and flamingo motifs.
This was a little ironic, since Americans had
hunted flamingos to extinction in Florida in the late
1800s, for plumes and meat. But no matter. In the
1950s, the new interstates would draw working-class
tourists down, too. Back in New Jersey, the Union
Products flamingo inscribed one’s lawn emphatically
with Florida’s cachet of leisure and extravagance. The
bird acquired an extra fillip of boldness, too, from the
direction of Las Vegas—the flamboyant oasis of
instant riches that the gangster Benjamin “Bugsy”
Siegel had conjured from the desert in 1946 with his
Flamingo Hotel. Anyone who has seen Las Vegas
knows that a flamingo stands out in a desert even
more strikingly than on a lawn. In the 1950s,
namesake Flamingo motels, restaurants, and lounges
cropped up across the country like a line of semiotic
sprouts.
And the flamingo was pink—a second and
commensurate claim to boldness. The plastics
industries of the fifties favored flashy colors, which
Tom Wolfe called “the new electrochemical pastels of
the Florida littoral: tangerine, broiling magenta, livid
pink, incarnadine, fuchsia demure, Congo ruby,
methyl green.” The hues were forward-looking rather
than old-fashioned, just right for a generation, raised
in the Depression, that was ready to celebrate its new
affluence. And as Karal Ann Marling has written, the
“sassy pinks” were “the hottest color of the decade.”
Washing machines, cars, and kitchen counters
proliferated in passion pink, sunset pink, and
Bermuda pink. In 1956, right after he signed his first
recording contract, Elvis Presley bought a pink
Cadillac.
Why, after all, call the birds “pink flamingos”— as
if they could be blue or green? The plastic flamingo is
a hotter pink than a real flamingo, and even a real
flamingo is brighter than anything else around it.
There are five species, all of which feed in flocks on
algae and invertebrates in saline and alkaline lakes in
mostly warm habitats around the world. The people
who have lived near these places have always singled
out the flamingo as special. Early Christians
associated it with the red phoenix. In ancient Egypt, it
symbolized the sun god Ra. In Mexico and the
Caribbean, it remains a major motif in art, dance, and
literature. No wonder that the subtropical species
stood out so loudly when Americans in temperate
New England reproduced it, brightened it, and sent it
wading across an inland sea of grass.
The American Scholar, Spring 1999