And Now, for Something Not So Completely Different

Hi all,

Sorry for my unpardonable silence of late. For a number of reasons, I've been lax in keeping up with the blog over the summer. Here are some of them:

• I started the blog a bit too shortly after the fall of He Who Shall Not Be Named--I needed more of a rest!
• I had filled my plate over the summer with a number of other writing projects that had higher priority (rightly or wrongly).
• This current blog reminded me a bit too much of your typical, run-on-the-mill political bitch and moan blog, of which there are already way too many.
• A related point: my desire to link my academic interests in rhetoric with popular political commentary wasn't quite working in the context of this blog--at least not to the extent I hoped.
• I was growing weary of Blogger. It's a great program, but I was wanting to get a bit more sophisticated in my knowledge of website/blog stuff, and needed some time to get up to speed on what else was out there and how to use it.

The good news (at least from my point of view) is that I've resolved these issues to my satisfaction, and am launching the blog that this blog had aspired to be, but didn't quite make.

So, for your future reading pleasure (I hope), I direct you to the newly created (and still slightly under construction) Unfrozen Caveman Rhetorician.

You can read more about it in the "About" section on the website. My hope is that it will be a nicer blog in a number of ways, particularly as I get up to speed on some of the additional features and options I have on a blog hosted on my own domain and using Wordpress.

Don't look for daily postings--probably a couple a week. But I hope to attract enough folks willing to chip in with comments, arguments, retorts, etc., to keep it a place of ongoing conversation.

Oh, and as for He Who Shall Not Be Named, he might be inching his way out from under the rock he's been hiding beneath. As a visitor here noted, he has published columns in the conservative mag Human Events on the budgeting process (basically a recycled rehash of a some stale "Point" commentaries) and (wait for it!) the Fairness Doctrine ! BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

While you're enjoying a chuckle over that, you'll also be amused to hear that he also popped up recently as an interview subject in a story posted on the right-wing news site CNSNews.com.

The topic of the story? Editorial political bias in the news media! BARHARHARHARHAR!!

Needless to say, if my scar starts burning, HWSNBN will be dealt with over at my new digs at UCR, and if, God forbid, the campaign season lures him out into the light of day, we'll take The Counterpoint out of mothballs and break him over our rhetorical knee.

Until that dark, and hopefully never-to-be-seen, day, I hope you visit UCR. Bring fire!

TJR

O'Reilly Upended by Rhetorical Judo

Bill “Papa Bear” O’Reilly used formidable one-two combination of name-calling and straw man argumentation when he suggested that the man who traveled to Europe after being diagnosed with TB was acting in line with “secular progressive” values. According to O’Reilly, secular progressives "put themselves above all others. That philosophy says, 'Me first, then I'll worry about you,'" while "traditional-values people put others on a par with themselves."

Who “secular progressives” are isn’t clear. It’s simply a term O’Reilly means to be pejorative (name-calling). The way to make it pejorative is to associate it with yucky things, such as selfishness. So O’Reilly constructs a fictional entity called “secular progressives” who hold the beliefs he attributes to them (the classic "straw man" fallacy).

Not only does this allow him to turn a specific incident in to a commentary on a huge group of people whose politics he disagrees with (something we’ve seen plenty of recently, most notably with the Virginia Tech shootings), but it helps solidify the bogeyman of the “secular progressive,” making it a more potent name to call perceived enemies in the future.

There are two possible lines of critique/response one could offer to this attack. The simplest is to argue directly against O’Reilly’s assertions and say that people who identify themselves as secular and/or progressive don’t hold the positions O’Reilly attributes to them.

A more effective way might be to flow with O’Reilly’s attack and ask him (and those who buy his argument) to identify the “secular progressives” he’s talking about. Certainly any thinking person is against people recklessly endangering others—let’s identify those who aren’t so that we can appropriately respond to them.

My suspicion is that this would result in lots of hemming and hawing without a lot of specifics. Should O’Reilly or his ideological playmates name the groups who are most often associated with “secular progressive” politics (feminists, environmentalists, people in favor of multi-culturalism, people against institutionalized prayer in schools, etc.), it’s easy enough to say, “But wait, these are groups that conservatives usually criticize for paying undo attention to social ‘rights’ at the expense of individual freedom. Doesn’t this contradict the premise of your comments about the guy with TB?”

In fact, one can easily turn O’Reilly’s attack back on him by granting his premise: it’s bad to put individual desires ahead of the collective good. Fine. After chastising Mr. TB, perhaps we should continue by going after heads of corporations who pollute the environment to make a bigger profit. Maybe we need to go after people who insist they have a sacred right to own semi-automatic weapons despite the fact that guns kill thousands of Americans every year. Let’s attack those who want tax cuts for themselves at the cost of astronomical debt for future generations. Let’s go after those who oppose universal health care. And the list can go on an on and on.

Rhetorically, it’s often best to simply grant the premise of an argument and ask the one making the argument to follow it through. When the argument is as dopey as what we see from O’Reilly, the attack trips over its own feet without getting into a battle of accusations.

War. What Is It Good For?

War. What is it good for?

Well, it makes a good metaphor to deploy if you want to maintain even slight support for your foreign policy.

Plenty of people have noted that the “war on terror” is a metaphor that the Bush administration wants to take literally. What’s even more interesting to me, though, is the way the conflict in Iraq is framed (to use George Lakoff’s term) using the metaphor of “war.”

I’ve mentioned previously that what’s going on in Iraq is not so much a war as a disastrous occupation. But “war” is the word that is used to describe it, not only by the administration, but by people across the board, including those adamantly opposed to Bush’s Iraq policy.

From a rhetorical point of view, the important thing is to think about what using that term means. It’s not an arbitrary word choice—it affects how we think about what’s going on.

Tabling for the moment whether what’s happening in Iraq meets the dictionary definition of “war,” and if so, whether the U.S. forces are actually fighting this war or are caught in the middle of it, let’s think about what the term “war” connotes.

First, obviously, is the notion of winners and losers. The administration, and a surprising number of its critics, talk about withdrawal from Iraq as “losing the war.” We will be “defeated” by the “enemy.”

As long as withdrawal is understood within this frame, it will be a hard policy to sell to the American people, despite the overwhelming disapproval of Bush’s policies and the desire to bring the troops home. Given our national mythos as “winners,” Americans will have a hard time stomaching something that is labeled as defeat in a war. There are even those who refuse to admit that the Vietnam War was “lost” (I’m flashing on Kevin Kline’s character in A Fish Called Wanda getting apoplectic when John Cleese brings up the subject).

In our collective national mythology, my sense is that “war” as a concept is intertwined with World War II—the war that made the U.S. a superpower; that was fought by the “greatest generation,” that defeated the unabashed evils of fascism and genocidal racism. It was the “good” war.

It is the war that, more than any other, defines us as global “winners.”

When our attitudes about war are so shaped by triumphalism, total victory of total evil, and ticker tape parades, it’s understandable that once a situation is couched in terms of war, anything less than that disturbs us. It runs counter to our collective narrative of ourselves—our self image as a nation.

The Bush administration has won a rhetorical victory by getting everyone—politicians, the press, the activists—to use “war” as the frame through which we see Iraq. It makes any efforts to question or end the administration’s policies doubly difficult.

The administration’s ability to win such a victory (and the willingness of so many to acquiesce to it) is surprising if only because the situation on the ground doesn’t have much in common with what “war” means. The “insurgency” (another term that’s rhetorically effective given the way it creates a falsely monolithic “enemy”) is a collection of groups that spend at least as much time killing one another as they do Americans. In fact, most of the losses in the Iraq war are Iraqis. It’s a low grade civil war in which U.S. troops are ineffectual peacemakers.

Unlike Vietnam or Korea, in which the U.S. had a firm alliance with one side in a civil war against another, we truly don’t have a dog in the Iraq fight. We have occupied the country, and that occupation—for any number of reasons—has allowed conflict to erupt among groups within Iraq. That conflict might be a war, but it’s not a war in which we are on one side or the other.

It’s probably too late to pull this off, but what those who want change in our Iraq policy should do is point out the obvious: that to the extent the U.S. was in a “war” in Iraq, it ended in the spring of 2003, just weeks after it started. We won. The multitude of failures have been post-war. They’re failures of occupation, not of war. Rather than talk about the war “already being lost,” critics of the administration should deny the validity of the president’s framing and replace it with a vocabulary of bureaucratic failure rather than military failure.

This might seem like splitting hairs, but I’d argue that not only would such a change in terminology be objectively more accurate, but it would open up more possibilities for creating a consensus for getting the hell out of there. Better to have screwed up an occupation than to have “lost” a “war.”

But as long as the language of war is in vogue among even those who oppose the administration’s Iraq policies, I fear we’ve rhetorically locked ourselves into a failure we won’t allow ourselves to walk away from.

Talking Heads Tilted Right

Sorry for my absence—the end of the semester, as it usually does, has swallowed most of my free time of late.

Just a brief observation about the public sphere as it’s now enacted through the media: have you noticed that between dinner and bedtime, you can actually find it difficult to find anything like “news” on the 24 hour cable networks? Moreover, what you get instead (commentary) is heavily weighted to the conservative side of things.

On any given weeknight, channel surfing CNN, Headline News, MSNBC, and FOX, you’ll come across former GOP Representative Joe Scarborough holding forth for an hour. Flip the channel, and you get the risible Glenn Beck. Bow ties your thing? You’ve got an hour of Tucker Carlson you can watch. Want the semblance of balance without actually wanting to deal with the real McCoy? You’ve got Hannity and Colmes (or, as Al Franken more accurately terms it, Hannity and Colmes). Fiscal conservatism and anti-immigrant rhetoric float your boat? Lou Dobbs trades in little else on his nightly show. For that matter, so does Brit Hume. And, of course, you’ve got “Papa Bear” Bill O’Reilly inhabiting the center of the conservative babbleverse.

On the liberal side you’ve got . . . Keith Olbermann? I like K.O., but his show is hardly equal time.

All this would be bad enough if it wasn’t for the continual opining by conservatives of their alleged marginalization in the media. Recently, Glenn Beck complained that as a white Christian male, he’s overlooked and ignored in society. The fact that he complained about this on his very own national television show didn’t seem to trip is irony alarm. Nor did the fact that every other talking head on the news networks is also a white Christian male. Apparently in Beck’s universe, African American Buddhist lesbians in wheelchairs are setting the public agenda rather than people like him.

The usual reply I hear in response to this point is that O’Reilly, Beck, etc., are 1) commentators, not news reporters, and 2) are only a drop in the bucket compared to the huge number of liberals that man the news desks of the mainstream media.

To the first point, I simply say, “Yes, exactly so!” The problem is precisely that time that could be spent doing journalism (involving things like, you know, investigating and reporting) is squandered with the airing of half-assed bloviating by folks whose only area of expertise is their own opinions. And on top of that, it largely reflects only one half of the political spectrum (making it, I suppose, quarter-assed bloviating).

As to the second, I’m still waiting for someone to explain to me how Katie Couric is somehow Trotsky in drag or how Dan Rather’s reporting, as flawed as it might have been, on the truth of Bush’s National Guard service (or lack thereof) somehow proves a systematic liberal bias, yet the fact that the mainstream media passed on unsubstantiated (an often demonstrably false) claims by the Bush administration about Iraq’s WMD programs (or lack thereof) to the public, paving the way for the invasion, doesn’t mean anything.

Are We Becoming "Little Horowitzes?"

Apologies if this seems like shameless double-dipping, but the following entry is cross posted from a posting on a communications studies discussion board to which I belong. After I wrote it, I realized it would also be appropriate for this blog as well. The discussion is about Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado professor who wrote, just after 9/11, that those who were killed could be considered "little Eichmanns." A committee at Colorado found some problems with plagiarism and uncited sources in some of Churchill's earlier work. The debate is essentially on whether academics should support Churchill under the aegis of defending academic freedom or shun him as a violator of academic principles and therefore someone we should wash our hands of.

That should be enough context to follow the post below. Just one more thing: I make reference to a previous post mentioning that the committee at UC used an analogy of a police officer stopping a car for speeding because it had a bumper sticker he/she found offensive. The analogy is meant to explain the committee's view that even though Churchill's case has received attention primarily because of right wing talking heads who dislike his politics, this has no bearing on the fact that his academic misconduct, while unrelated, is real.



I’m basically agnostic on the Ward Churchill issue (or, if you prefer, wishy-washy). I don’t know his scholarship first hand, nor have I read the Colorado committee’s report on him in anything other than tiny excerpted chunks. I have a decidedly negative gut-level reaction to both Churchill (whose “little Eichmans” comment was insipid and cruel and who is charged with academic violations that, if true, are reprehensible) and many of his detractors, such as David Horowitz (who evidently doesn’t bother to write much of the contents of the books he slaps his name on, and who strikes me as the embodiment of the sort of anti-intellectualism that does a disservice to all of higher education).

However, I think the issue (as well as the discussion here) raises some interesting communication-related issues.

Specifically, to what extent does context matter in evaluating a rhetorical act (in this case, the “speech act” of dismissing Mr. Churchill from his academic post)?

Mr. Bytwerk cites the analogy given by the Colorado committee of the police officer who pulls over a motorist for speeding because he/she is offended by a bumper sticker on the car. As Mr. Bytwerk notes himself, this is not a great analogy, but it suggests a parallel analogy that gets at my point.

Imagine a racist Anglo police officer sees a car with an African American driver and pulls the car over simply to intimidate and harass the driver. In doing so, the officer discovers some violation (expired license, open container, or whatever). Is it legal and/or ethical to prosecute the driver on a violation discovered through an unlawful search?

The truth is that this happens all the time, but the Constitution provides protection (at least in theory) to citizens from being targeted by authorities for reasons unconnected to a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.

The analogy is, as Mr. Bytwerk notes of the original version crafted by the Colorado committee, not great. For one, it’s using law enforcement as an analogy for academic “policing.” But the racist cop analogy is better than the original in at least one respect. My understanding (and I certainly admit I could be mistaken) is that Mr. Churchill’s scholarship has been taken to task as the result of his controversial (and, in my opinion, idiotic) political comments. Only after becoming a lightning rod did people start going through his scholarship from the past to find cases of academic/intellectual misconduct. In the speeding motorist/bumper sticker example, the violation and the political speech are perceived at the same time. In the racist police officer example, the violation is only discovered as a result of politically motivated search based on preexisting antipathy toward the target. The latter example seems closer to the situation with Mr. Churchill.

In fact, the essay which drew so much attention to Mr. Churchill was published in September of 2001, and little if anything was said until a college newspaper turned up the essay in 2005, after which it became a national issue largely due to Bill O’Reilly and Colorado governor Bill Owens.

Had it not been for the political enmity toward Mr. Churchill’s views, his scholarship would not have gotten the fine-tooth-comb treatment it did. (If his intellectual sins had been so glaring, why hadn’t they come up before?)

As I say, I’m not certain I think it’s out of the question to hold Mr. Churchill accountable for academic dishonesty, even if it was only discovered via political outrage at comments he was certainly legally and academically entitled to make. On the other hand, I have some sympathy for someone whose academic integrity is questioned as means of giving an air of legitimacy to an essentially political animosity.

Why? Well, I have the dubious distinction of having been targeted by a national political commentator as being, along with Ward Churchill, an example of a “failure in higher education.”

Ex-vice president and editorial voice for Sinclair Broadcasting, Mark Hyman, delivered a commentary aired on dozens of its local news affiliates across the country in which he attacked several academics, including Churchill and me, for having radical views. According to him, folks like Churchill and I are "unemployable individuals [who] are paid to proselytize intellectually bankrupt viewpoints."

What was my “intellectually bankrupt viewpoint?" According to Hyman, I thought that plagiarism was fine and dandy (something that probably shocked the numerous students I’ve flunked for committing even a single instance of plagiarism in my classes).

Hyman used a quotation from an online syllabus for a correspondence course I was teaching at the time to make his claim. To do it, he had to twist and creatively edit the course statement on plagiarism. More importantly, he attributed this statement to me despite the fact that the syllabus clearly stated that I was the instructor of the class, but not the author of the course materials (our department chair had done most of the writing).

Why was Hyman grubbing around online to find something he could use to charge me with academic malpractice? Because I had committed the sin of creating a blog that did a daily critique of his rhetoric. Getting interviewed by Air America radio about Sinclair, media consolidation, and my blog was apparently the final straw, since it was only days later that he included me in his attack on Churchill and other academics.

After I informed the legal counsel of Sinclair of Hyman’s factual errors (and hinted that a retraction would be in their financial best interest), Hyman retracted his comments (although he never fessed up to his true motivations in going after me).

[If you’re interested, Media Matters for America covered both the initial attack and Hyman’s retraction in stories found at the following websites:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200502180002
http://mediamatters.org/items/200503080003 ]


My situation differs from Mr. Churchill’s in that the charges laid at my feet were demonstrably untrue. While I don’t know the specifics of Mr. Churchill’s case, my suspicion is that there’s at least some legitimacy to the charges (although, as one previous post noted, the claim that because “a committee” said so, it must be true is dubious at best).

Having said that, I can imagine someone arguing that even if the charges are all true, and even if these charges are serious enough to warrant Mr. Churchill’s dismissal, and even if Mr. Churchill deserves to be dismissed, the fact that the issue has been, from the beginning, enmeshed in partisan politics makes the decision qualitatively different than it would be if O’Reilly, Horowitz, et. al. had never uttered the name “Ward Churchill.”

I can imagine an argument that states, contra Mr. Bytwerk, that at this point, one cannot hermetically seal off the issue from the political atmosphere around it and make it purely an exercise in academic self-discipline. Such an argument might suggest that once conservative talking heads made this a personal crusade due to Mr. Churchill’s political statements, any decision to fire him would necessarily have a chilling effect on academic freedom and free speech in general. Better to let ten sloppy and reckless academics keep their jobs than have one academic cowed into silence for fear that, if he/she makes controversial statements that offend enough people, he/she will be targeted for dismissal.

I say again: I’m not making this argument. I don’t know that I buy it. It *does* seem, however, to be a reasonable argument that deserves consideration.

I haven’t signed the petition supporting Mr. Churchill. The little I know of his scholarship, almost solely through second-hand sources and fragments, suggests to me that in and of itself, his dismissal wouldn’t be a huge loss to the intellectual community.

But what prevents me from agreeing wholeheartedly with those who say, “He’s committed academic sins, so he should get the axe,” is the sense that, as a rhetorical act, his dismissal has a different meaning because of the context in which it’s made. As much as we might like to pretend that we can judge the matter solely in academic terms, I think that such a stance ignores the complex communicative context and the role it plays in giving meaning to the speech act of dismissing Mr. Churchill.

At the very least, I can understand why some who might A) find Mr. Churchill’s politics repugnant, and B) find his academic sins unforgivable, could still balk at the idea of firing him given the highly politicized movement to oust him. This is particularly true when many of the voices most loudly calling for his dismissal are also voices that regularly traffic in the anti-intellectualism that pops up at various points along the political spectrum, mocking the foundational values of the life of the mind to an even greater extent than the sins of any particular academic could ever do.

Rush Limbaugh, Part Duh

As a follow up on yesterday's post, it's worth noting that Rush Limbaugh continues to spin his wheels concerning his assertion that Seung-Hui Cho "had to have been a liberal."

Yesterday, we saw that he tried to write it off as a joke and/or an experiment on how liberals (e.g., Media Matters for America) take things "out of context."

The problem with that explanation is A) MMFA quoted him in context, providing a transcript an audio version of his remarks, and B) Limbaugh said that he really believed what he said.

Yesterday, he repeated the idea that he was simply "baiting" MMFA. As we noted yesterday, however, the motivation behind his comments are immaterial insofar as they are offensive no matter what the context is.

Limbaugh went further by saying that MMFA (and others) should learn to "stop being baited when I am baiting you."

He also claimed that "everyone who listens to me agrees with what I said, so where's the controvesy?"

Such shabby argument barely warrants a response, but just for giggles, let's point out that this argument is akin to saying to an African American "You should learn to stop being baited when I call you a n****r" or saying that as long as David Duke is speaking to a rally of fellow clansmen (even if it's in the public sphere, as is the case with anything broadcast on the citizen-owned airwaves), no one should object to his racist rantings.

tjr

Your Momma!

Your momma is so dumb, it takes her two hours to watch “60 minutes!”

Laughing? Probably not. It might be because the joke isn’t all that clever. But it also might be that even though I don’t know your momma, saying something demeaning about her, even when it’s intended as “humor,” is insulting and hurtful.

That’s the whole point behind “The Dozens”—particularly “You momma is so . . .” jokes. It makes no difference if you know the joke teller has never met your mother; just commenting on her appearance, intelligence, or sexual proclivities is enough make you burn.

Why is that, and what does it have to do with Rush Limbaugh? (And no, I won’t go into a litany of “Your right-wing demagogue radio host is so fat . . . “ jokes.)

I suggest it’s because words do things. Words are actions, not passive containers of “truth.” If they were, “Your momma” jokes would be meaningless. If you told me, “Ted, your momma is so fat, when she jumped up in the air, the bitch got stuck,” I’d simply reply, “Actually, that isn’t the case, even on a metaphorical level. My mother was always of approximately average weight for a female of her height and age.”

But since words do things, I’d probably take a swing at you. Not because what you said was or wasn’t true, but because you had violated a basic standard of decency.

In our post-Imus phase of public discourse, that’s important to keep in mind. How many times have you heard public figures (or people you know, for that matter) write off an inappropriate comment by saying “it was just a joke?”

There are cases when this defense is appropriate, particularly if the hearers didn’t understand that it was meant as a joke. If correctly understanding the statement hinges on recognizing the humor (such as in irony or satire), explaining the humorous intent can clear things up.

But in the case of Imus and “your momma” jokes, this isn’t the case. Everyone knows the intent is to say something amusing (at least from the point of view of the speaker). The animosity doesn’t come from misunderstanding the intent, but from the words themselves.

This takes us to Rush Limbaugh, one of the practicing masters of the unfunny joke. On a recent broadcast, Limbaugh said that Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, “must’ve been a liberal,” citing Cho’s paranoid ramblings about the evils of a hedonistic culture and wealthy fellow students.

After saying “a liberal committed this act,” Limbaugh attempts to defuse any counterattack by anticipating it:

Now, the drive-bys will read on a website that I'm attacking liberalism by
comparing this guy to them. That's exactly what they do every day, ladies and
gentlemen. I'm just pointing out a fact. I am making no extrapolation; I'm just
pointing it out.

Of course, extrapolation is precisely what he’s doing, but let’s let that slide. The more important rhetorical move Limbaugh makes here is to deny he’s doing precisely what he’s doing by preemptively predicting he’ll be called out for it. By anticipating the predictable criticism he’s in for, Limbaugh wants his audience to write it off because, after all, the media is simply doing exactly what Rush said they would (as if the predictability of the response somehow invalidates it).

But Limbaugh goes even further with an unintentionally hilarious defense of his comment after Media Matters for America posted a transcript of his initial comments linking the Virginia Tech massacre to liberalism.

Claiming he had intended to reveal how willing liberals in general, and MMFA in particular, to take conservatives out of context, Limbaugh said that MMFA had fallen for his ploy “hook, line, and sinker.” He doesn’t say in what way MMFA took him “out of context,” although the clear implication is that he wasn’t being serious.

But, as with the “your momma” jokes, identifying the remarks as humorous doesn’t do a thing to diminish their offensiveness. Words do things. Using an unspeakable tragedy to score cheap political points is despicable in and of itself. It’s offensive not only to liberals, but to all those touched in any way by the events of ten days ago.

Just in case you’re of the mind that somehow framing a comment as humor, no matter how appalling, makes it okay, it pays to look at this little nugget of cognitive dissonance Limbaugh serves up:

I was making a joke about the -- I was just setting everybody up to see how this
stuff works, although I do believe that it was liberalism that got a hold of
this guy and made him hate things, professors and this sort of thing. [Emphasis
added]

So, Limbaugh was making a joke, but he wasn’t joking.

The larger issue here, and one that I’ll only touch on (I’m sure they’ll be occasion to explore it more deeply) is the extent to which this sort of humor . . . or discourse . . . or whatever . . . is motivated by (and creates) a sense of reveling in division. The point of such comments isn’t to forward an idea or make a claim, but simply to wallow in the masturbatory pleasures of self-righteous self-congratulation—congratulation for not being one of “them.”

Such use of rhetoric is hardly limited to Limbaugh or conservatives. Indeed, such rhetoric depends on “them” using similar rhetoric. Hence, we see Limbaugh’s preemptive enactment of what “they” will say about his statement; much of the purpose of making such statements is to goad the other side into reacting to them. And if you can “predict” this behavior, it gives you (an your listeners) a false sense of superiority for not being one of the mindless reactionaries that make up the ranks of those you oppose (and who, by your opposition, create your identity).

My sense is that the most productive response to this sort of rhetoric is via what Kenneth Burke calls the “comic frame,” in which we self-reflexively call attention to our own use of language, turning the tragedy of division into the comedy of play. Such an approach would defang such rhetoric without becoming entwined with its hatefulness.

How precisely one goes about that in a case like this is something I’d like to throw out to all of you in the blogosphere:

How does one critique/respond to rhetoric like Limbaugh’s without simply perpetuating the dynamic he sets up? Is it enough to point it out? Is attacking the validity of the claim worthwhile, or does that miss the big picture? And, beyond what I’ve suggested, how do we determine when a “joke” isn’t funny?

Rhetoric on the Radio

On NPR this weekend, the show "American Weekend" had a story on the tactics of political rhetoric, complete with specific examples of rhetorical figures from American political speeches and discussing the origins of rhetoric in ancient Athens. You can listen to the show online. The webpage also has links to some rhetoric-related websites, including one that illustrates a large number of rhetorical figures through audio examples from American political speeches.


It's worth a listen.

Some questions:

What do you think about the characterization of ancient Athens in the piece, particularly in its alleged difference from contemporary America vis-a-vis rhetoric?

Republican pollster and spinmeister Frank Luntz is interviewed in the piece. Is what he does "rhetoric?" If so, is it good rhetoric? Bad rhetoric? Good rhetoric used for bad purposes?

At times, it seemed to me the piece suggested that "rhetoric" as it was defined in this context is a practice of putting style before substance and persuading people in at least as semi-underhanded way. How do you think rhetoric came across in this piece?

Dissemination of a Failure

This post is a failure.

Perhaps more accurately, it’s a description of a failure.

At first, I didn’t think there would be much to say about the horror at Virginia Tech from a communication/rhetorical perspective. Perhaps down the line, some sort of analysis of the media coverate might be interesting and important. Already, some have discussed how new forms of media like Facebook and Myspace played a role in disseminating information during and after the murders. But nothing substantive came to my mind.

As the week has worn on, though, certain bits and pieces suggest that ideas of communication, and its limitations play a role.

I’ve tried to formulate coherent thoughts on this, but I’ve failed. I’ve started this post in a number of ways, and deleted them all. All I have are fragments of ideas, loose threads that I can’t tie up, at least not yet.

If I was able to, I’d want to say something about how the killer’s, Cho Seung-hui’s, unwillingness or inability to communicate played a role in the tragedy. If one believes the scraps of reporting that people have put together on him, he didn’t speak much even as a child.

Classmates, roommates, and teachers all describe attempting to enter into dialog with him, only to be met by silence.

When asked to write his name, he wrote a question mark.

He majored in English, wrote plays, and used instant messaging, but rarely spoke directly to anyone.

A roommate described getting called on his cellphone by him, who insisted on referring to himself as “Question Mark.” While on the phone, the roommate tracked him down in a dorm lounge. When faced with a physical presence, Cho denied that he had been talking to his roommate on the phone at all.

If I had the ability, I’d say something about all of this, suggesting something about Cho’s relationship to communication and what it might say about what he did.

I’d say something about how the plays he wrote for class (made available on the internet—itself an ironic communication-related event), as execrable as they are in all sorts of ways, both turn on the malignant use of the spoken word—the ways language can be used to misrepresent the truth to attack or punish someone.

I’d note that the description of Cho turns him into an odd, malignant version of Bartleby from Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Bartleby, a copyist for a financial company, refuses to take direction from his employer, simply saying “I prefer not to” to any request. His apparent lack of life (he actually sleeps at the office) and unwillingness to express himself in any meaningful way makes him an object of both frustration and pity to his employer, who remains helpless to get Bartleby to engage with him, or anyone else, in even the most rudimentary ways.

Cho seems to have caused similar feelings in those around him. They attempted to engage with him, help him, understand him, but were ignored. Unwilling or unable to participate in dialog, he became a cipher, an absence of meaning. Yet, unlike Bartleby, his refusal to engage in dialog turned into an act of unspeakable violence, turning Bartleby’s “I prefer not” with the ultimate “You will not.” Rather than simply keeping his silence, he silenced others.

I’d try to use this comparison to make some sort of sense of things, but I can’t.

Bartleby brings to mind a work by one of my mentors, John Durham Peters, who notes in his wonderfully humane work on communication theory, Speaking Into the Air, that Bartleby represents the way in which imagining communication in terms of dialog is limited. To engage someone in dialog, you implicitly make a demand of them that they return the favor. It is an exchange. Bartley is unwilling or unable to participate in this exchange.

Peters suggests “dissemination” is a better model: spreading the seed of words without necessarily asking for or expecting anything in return.

Could this explain Cho’s angst in any way? Could the attempt by others to engage him in dialog, no matter how well intentioned, have reinforced the notion of being demanded to speak, of being asked—even commanded—to perform? For someone unable or unwilling to perform, did this simply deepen his alienation? And what would communicative “dissemination” looked like in this case? Would it have mattered? Or was Cho simply broken in mind and spirit from the very beginning? Is it accurate to write him off as a malevolent psychopath? Is it morally correct to do so? Or do we deaden ourselves to something important if we deny his humanity, no matter how twisted a form it took?

And what of Cho’s multimedia suicide note, sent to a broadcast network? Is this the dark side of dissemination? Is the suicide note the ultimate form of dissemination—of speaking into the air without hope or expectation of a reply? And is the package Cho sent, complete with video and audio, and broadcast across the airwaves of the world, the ultimate example of the ultimate form of dissemination?

I don’t know. I don’t have answers to any of these questions. If I were a more able thinker, I’d be able to assemble these shards of meaning into a coherent whole of some sort and make an argument for a way of illuminating at least one small part of the abyss last Monday opened in front of us. But I’m not able to do that. Certainly not yet.

If there is a more archetypal form of dissemination than the suicide note, perhaps it is prayer—a speaking into the air, this time with hope but still no assurance, that our words will find an audience.

And it is all I have to offer.

Britain Ditches "War" Talk

In a story related to my last post, international development secretary Hilary Benn of Britain made a speech a couple of days ago criticizing the use of the phrase "war on terror."


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1660976.ece

Why Even Pacifists Love "War"

I remember when I was a kid, I had hundreds and hundreds of toy soldiers. A whole ice chest full of them. Not to mention all the tanks, trucks, halftracks, artillery pieces, etc. I loved setting up elaborate battles in which these plastic figures would die again and again and again.

Why did I do this? I suppose I could say that I had always been interested in history, and this was one way of “playing” at history.

But on the other hand, I didn’t use plastic figures to recreate the Constitutional Convention or the completion of the transcontinental railroad. It was war I played at.

Always war.

Why?

There’s an answer to this question, but, in keeping with the theme of this blog, I’d like to approach it from a rhetorical point of view.

Much like my 8-year-old self, George W. Bush likes to play at war, too. He certainly likes talking about it. In Monday's statement about the Iraq “War” Supplemental spending bill, he surrounded himself with veterans and their families. He also used the word “war” 14 times in a statement about 1900 words long. If you’re scoring at home, that means that between one-half and a full one percent of the words he uttered were “war.”

Bush uses this word to refer to the situation in Iraq. Apparently, he means it literally. Or at least he wants us to take it literally.

The truth is that what’s going on in Iraq is not war, at least not one that we’re fighting. The president also loves to talk about “victory” and “defeat” (he used the latter word seven times in his statement). But any war, any military victory or defeat, happened long ago. The Iraqi army was defeated. The enemy capital was occupied.

If we waived the technicality that, legally, only Congress can declare war, we might have reason to call the invasion of Iraq a “war.” Nevertheless, the we must grant that this war ended years ago.

What we have now is an occupation. An ugly one at that. What’s loosely termed “the insurgency” (as if it is some monolithic enemy, like “The Empire”) is actually a hodgepodge of factions, tribes, and paramilitary groups fighting one another more than the U.S.

Since one of the few things these folks agree on is that America shouldn’t be occupying their country, they kill our men and women in uniform when they have a chance, but their true animosity is for one another.

But leave it to our president to condense an incredibly complex situation and the U.S. role in it into a single simple concept, no matter how distorting it might be: "war." You don’t need to admit that the situation in Iraq is a disaster to see that “war” has become a metaphor. It’s literal applicability is long gone.

And just as I ask why I spent hours and hours setting up my little plastic soldiers only to knock them down with a marble, I ask why does the president fixate on this term?

There are lots of possible answers. But the storyline I’d like to follow begins with psychoanalytic textual criticism.

Yeah, I know what you’re probably thinking: going all Freudian is just going to be talking about how cruise missiles look like phalluses and that Bush wanted to topple Hussein because it would be a symbolic way of killing Poppy, since he secretly longs to sexually possess Babs.

But that’s just a caricature of how psychoanalytic criticism works (not to say there aren’t plenty of serious-minded folks who actually use this cartoonish version of it). Psychoanalytic criticism provides us with much more nuance than this.

The particular concept I’d like to use to have a better understanding of how and why the president insists on the “war” metaphor is “condensation.”

Condensation refers to the tendency to symbolically reduce a complex series of concepts and relationships into something much simpler. This process, by necessity, obscures and distorts aspects of the reality it pretends to represent.

That is what “war” is as a symbol in Bush’s rhetoric. It’s not a term that passively represents reality, but actively shapes it by invoking a whole related mythology tied to the term itself, a mythology that might or might not be useful in the context of the Iraq situation.

What does “war” represent? Most obviously, violence, death, and destruction. But, as even pacifist psychologist/philosopher William James noted over a hundred years ago, “war” as an idea also connotes positive values of nobility and courage. He said this in the context of thinking about the romantic (and still living) memory of the Civil War, and the allure of the Spanish American War was raging at the time.

What James suggested is that we need to find a moral equivalent of war—a way of replacing actual war with something that appeals to that aspect of our social being that war—or at least the idea of it—satisfies. These values are not depraved or destructive in and of themselves; it’s our willingness to celebrate these values through killing one another that is unacceptable.

The ennobling connotations of war—the part of it as a concept that touches on virtues we rightly prize—is what makes it so appealing as a metaphor. In the context of American history, it conjures up associations with World War II—the last “declared” war in our history. The “Greatest Generation.” Toppling fascism. “Saving Private Ryan.” Good guys vs. bad guys. National unity. Storming the beaches at Normandy. Rosie the Riveter announcing “We Can Do It.” The associations are rich and oddly positive, much like the associations with the Civil War in James’s time. No one would actually wish for a repeat of WWII, but we would feel diminished without the resonances it brings.

And the reason I probably played with toy soldiers was because conflict was a way of playfully enacting values of sacrifice, bravery, loyalty, pride, and moral conviction. These are the values that “war” as an abstraction conjures up.

The problem is that the men and women in Baghdad aren’t toy soldiers, but human beings. But by referring to what they are involved in as “war,” Bush turns them into abstractions—offerings on the altar of martial values. Only then can he hope to make Americans feel comfortable with the sacrifice. By condensing the Gordian knot of Iraq into the symbolically potent term “war,” Bush tries to make us (and perhaps himself) feel okay with what’s going on. After all, only a little over 3000 soldiers have died—isn’t that so much better than the tens and hundreds of thousands who’ve died in past wars? Aren’t we in fact paying a low price for the celebration of martial values?

The only remedy to falling continually into this trap is, as James tells us, to find another way of expressing these values in a way that honors them, but doesn’t kill people. This would require leadership of considerable imagination—imagination sorely lacking at present. To give just one possible example, though, what might have happened had after 9/11 if we had a president who was able to rhetorically motivate the country strive as a nation for a “victory” over Islamic extremism by “combating” our need for foreign oil, “cutting off” the influence of the unstable nations of the Middle East on our foreign policy by “fighting” for new ways of meeting our energy needs?

“War” is a potent metaphor precisely because it conjures up values that are indeed important and valuable. But war as a reality is not necessary or desirable for these values to be enacted. And as a symbol, it condenses the reality of the situation in Iraq in ways that fundamentally distort the reality of the situation, lulling us into accepting what is unacceptable. By continuing to use the psychologically potent symbol of war, despite the inappropriateness of the term in any literal sense to our involvement in Iraq, Bush sublimates the grotesque in our national consciousness.

We shouldn’t accept that.

And that’s why none of us should acquiesce to using the term “war” in referring to either our involvement in Iraq, or our attempts to stop terrorism.

It’s not enough to be against the “war in Iraq.” We must be against “war.”

The Duke Lacrosse Case: An Idelogical Critique

The decision yesterday to drop all charges against the three Duke lacrosse players accused (at least initially) of raping a woman who was performing as an exotic dancer at a team party has brought up one of the ongoing questions in my mind about this case: why did this issue become politicized in the way it did?

In this post, I offer one take on this question through the use of ideological criticism.

Ideological rhetorical criticism focuses on the ways power is created, maintained, used, and abused in society, and the ways in which language is used in these processes.

Such critical approaches would include feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial criticism, although ideological criticism need not fall into any of these categories.

Part of the role of the ideological critic is to use criticism to advance a social or political cause through questioning and investigating how language is used by power structures to conceal and maintain themselves. In other words, ideological critics tend to wear their policial hearts on their sleeve.

Sounds good to me.

One of the odd things about the discourse surrounding the Duke Lacrosse case that struck me early on was the extent to which conservative public voices came to the defense of the accused. Over a year ago, Rush Limbaugh referred to the alleged victim as (wait for it) a “ho,” adding:

I just, I'm looking at this case down there at Duke, [caller], and it's --
there's some things about it, some inconsistencies. You've got some timeline
differentiations and matriculations and, and so forth.

Several months ago, Glenn Beck referred to what was happening to the accused as a “lynching without the rope.”

With the announcement that all charges were dropped, many conservative voices in the blogosphere spoke almost jubilantly about this as if it were a political victory, and added to this personal attacks on the alleged victim.

Posting a photo of the accuser, the blog “Insignificant Thoughts” opined:

Make sure you make note of the woman in the picture. You’ll never see her again.
She’ll never be questioned. She’ll never be criticized. We’ll never hear from
her again. She wasted more than a year with her lies and almost destroyed three
innocent lives. I seriously doubt anyone will press charges, and we’ll now be
subjected to numerous lectures on how this lying piece of garbage being called
out for what she is will stop women who really are victims of sexual assaults
from coming forward, the assumption being that if these three guys were
convicted, innocent or not, we’d be better off.

The sentiment was similar over at “SisterToldjah”:

I’m hoping that the three accused players will sue the state and/or Mike Nifong
for the hardships they’ve suffered since being falsely accused and made out to
be guilty by Nifong himself in the early days of the ‘investigation.’ Because
it’s my feeling that in this case, justice has not been served - for the real
victims here: the three lacrosse players, whose names were dragged through the
mud thanks to a lying stripper and a deceptive attorney who wanted to get
re-elected even if it meant ruining three young lives in the process.

And at “Betsy’s Page,” the accused were lauded for their character:

We often mouth aphorisms about learning from adversity, but these three young
men have really demonstrated that they have indeed done so. Sadly, I expect that
we won't see any such demonstration of character from all those in the media and
among those in academia, particularly at Duke University itself, for their rush to judgment. A distressingly large number of professors at the university acted as if the players were guilty simply because an accusation had been made and the accuser
was a poor black woman and they were white well-to-do athletes.

This is just a smattering of what the celebratory mood seen in much of the conservative prattle-sphere.


In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with these sentiments. When the system works to correct a wrong—even (and perhaps especially) one it’s implicated in itself—that’s something we should celebrate, to say nothing of being thankful that our justice system puts the burden on the state to prove guilt. Yes, it’s a terrible thing when innocent people are unjustly accused, and it’s a wonderful thing when the system works and undoes that wrong.

So, what’s at issue? For me, it’s best summed up in another post from a popular conservative blog, “Mr. Minority”. MM poses the rhetorical question:

As Fred Barnes said on Brit Humes show last night, how many other times has this
type of action against the innocent happened?

Well, MM, a great many times. Is it common for this to happen to affluent, white, educated men? Probably not. But unjust accusations against the innocent? All the time, my man.

Exhibit A: Guantanamo Bay.

And this is where the issue becomes interesting from a rhetorical point of view. The conservative concern with the rights of the accused, outrage at false accusations, and glee at the dropping of unjust charges is a jarringly juxtaposed with the rhetoric from many of these same mouths when it comes to the legal system for all.

How many times are liberal groups (e.g., the ACLU) lambasted for “coddling criminals” or putting “the rights of the crook ahead of the rights of victims” for raising the same issues that conservatives did in the Duke case? When people were getting tortured at Abu Ghraib, many of them completely innocent of any crime, how often did conservatives attack anyone who voiced the least concern about issues of justice as “anti-American” or “terrorist sympathizers?”

In short, conservative concern for the rights of the accused seems oddly sporadic, depending more on who the accused is than the principle itself.

Now, the reverse can be said of liberal/progressives. Many on the left were quick to support the accuser in this case and bemoaned the culture of privilege that they felt led a gang of simian preppies to sexually maul this poor woman.

If we just wanted to throw stones, we could just say “a plague on both your houses” and move on. But there are some important issues here.

First, why would those on the left tend to side with the accused when they (as those on the right observe) profess a deep concern with the rights of individuals who are accused by the state of wrongdoing?

The answer, I think, lies in the fact that what underlies liberal concern with the rights of the accused is a broader concern with the right of individuals in the face of power structures. Such powers are most obviously seen in the government (given its unique ability to punish individual citizens legally), but it doesn’t end there. Among other power structures are the “holy trinity” of social forces: race, class, and gender inequalities.

Seen in this light, the liberal tendency to side with the accuser seems less out of character. Yes, as the accuser, she is on the side of the state and is invoking its might to punish individuals. But she herself exists at the business end of the hegemonic stick, as a poor woman of color.

A radical feminist critique of the situation might suggest that, regardless of what did or didn’t happen at that lacrosse party, the woman in question *had been* violated. Wasn’t it her position in society that drove her to trade on her sexuality for monetary survival? In terms of power relations, how different is what happened at Durham different from the plantation master using his chattel to satisfy his libidinal longings?

I wouldn’t go that far because it dehumanizes everyone involved, making them into allegorical characters. From what I’ve heard, the guys on the lacrosse team tended to be assholes, but that doesn’t mean they deserve to be saddled with the guilt of all oppressors past and present.

On the other hand, one needn’t use hyperbole to understand that the woman in this case is someone who stood in an inferior power relation to those whom she accused in many ways. If a hallmark of liberalism is concern for protecting the individual from unfair consequences of arbitrary power, then one can understand the tendency of those on the left to find their sympathies inclined toward the accuser.

There’s actually a fair amount of overlap between liberals and conservatives (at least those of a certain stripe) on this issue. In their more libertarian incarnations, conservatives look on government’s ability to victimize and control the individual with suspicion. As a result, you find alliances among those on the left and right on issues such as the Patriot Act, which both groups see as a potentially dangerous abuse of hegemonic power structures against the individual.

Where conservatives and liberals part ways is on the question of what constitutes a “hegemonic power structure.” Liberals see these at work in the machinations of racism, sexism, class, and unchecked corporate power. All are examples of unwarranted power held by some citizens at the expense of others.

Conservatives, on the other hand, largely dismiss these, or at least rate them as of little concern compared with governmental power. For example, they tend to see class as a side effect of the free market—a result of choices made by the individual. In a free market, the individual can make choices that allow her or him recreate their class identity. To suggest that an individual is victimized by such a power structure is anathema. Worse, it is an open challenge to what they see as a valid and legitimate method of dispersing power and wealth.

And this is why we have conservatives so clearly taking the side of the accused in this case. If the apparent liberal flip-flop in this particular instance is based on the deeper philosophical concerns liberals have about power relationships and the individual, so is the conservative flip-flop.

What I mean is that conservatives are generally supportive of existing power structures and suspicious of those who challenge their legitimacy. Just as liberals sided with the accuser largely because of the fact that she is, in many ways, at the low end of the power hierarchies, conservatives side with the accused largely because of the fact that they are, in many ways, at the top of the power hierarchies—power hierarchies that in general benefit conservatives, or which are at least philosophically endorsed by them.

So the accuser and accused *do* end up becoming allegorical characters in a socio-political drama in the rhetoric of both sides, with the accuser standing in for those forces thought to challenge or subvert what conservatives consider the natural and rightful order of things, while the accused represent those who’ve justly reached the top of that order through their (or their ancestors’) abilities.

Liberals see it the other way, with the accuser representing those who have long been silenced, abused, violated, and kept down through the self-interested exercise of power by those who don’t necessarily deserve it (e.g., rich white-boy lacrosse players).

Both ways of framing the situation risk jettisoning the specific facts in favor of ideology, and confusing the outcome of a specific case with a win or loss for their particular set of values.

But to put my own ideological cards on the table (and that comes with the territory of doing ideological criticism), if one is faced with a choice of a political philosophy that seeks to constantly question how and why those with power exercise it over those who don’t, and one that seeks to defend those power structures to such an extent that it only recognizes the dangers of such structures when they turn on themselves, I think the choice is clear.




Questions:

Why did Limbaugh get away with calling the accuser a “ho” over a year ago, but Imus, in a less venomous use of the term, got his hat handed to him?

Should the accuser’s name/photo be used openly by the press (as it has on the web already)? Does this depend on whether it can be proved that her accusations were knowingly false and malicious? (The authorities in Durham claim that it’s possible that she in fact believed the various versions she told them, despite the fact that they weren’t consistent).
What other reasons are there for the politicization of this issue along liberal/conservative lines? What am I missing or wrong about? What else can be said?

Semiotic Clouds

A guy by the name of Juri Lotman, an early film theorist, came up with the idea of the “semiotic aura.” Like many academic terms, it’s a fancy word for something we all have a sense of already from our own experience, but gives it a specific name.

“Semiotic aura” refers to the way in which actors who appear in movies bring their “persona” from previous roles to each new movie they appear in. That is, even if Sylvester Stallone appears in a film adaptation of Krapp’s Last Tape, he still brings with him associations the audience has of him as Rocky (and Rambo, etc.) and these will color the meaning of his performance in the new movie, no matter what he does.

The “semiotic aura” is something basically of the actor’s own creation, given choices of roles and performances. I think there’s something here that applies to Don Imus that helps explain both why he’s popular and why his most recent excursion into racist rhetoric has drawn the attention and ire it has.

But in the case of Imus, his public persona isn’t entirely a creation of himself. Rather, it owes a lot to other people’s willingness to be publicly associated with him and to lend their own cache to him.

I suggest the term “semiotic cloud” as a reference to those persons and organizations that, in their association with a particular speaker, color our perception of what she or he says. While a speaker can still play a role in creating this cloud, the power ultimately rests with the people who choose to remain in it. If they don’t, it’s a cloud that can dissipate quickly.

And, for reasons unclear to me, Imus has a bonafide cumulonimbus of a semiotic cloud, regularly schmoozing with high profile politicos and journalists, whose willingness to appear on his show bestows on him a degree of gravitas he wouldn’t enjoy otherwise. Lord knows his scintillating wit and insight doesn’t merit much attention on its own.

I haven’t made it through more than five minutes of listening/watching Imus. The coquettish relationship he, and his collaborators on his show, have with out-and-out racism (and misogyny, and homophobia, etc.) aside, I just find his program incredibly dull. It’s a downer. He’s a curmudgeon without any real wit or insight to leaven his negativity. Even the humor is largely aimed at coming up with the most demeaning and vitriolic things to say about whoever comes up in conversation.

Imus’s show is thanatos to Howard Stern’s jouissance.

But, unlike Stern, who’s guest couch is usually chockablock with one-legged strippers and D-list celebs, the “I-man” still lands big-name guests.

To outrageously mix metaphors, though, this semiotic cloud is a two-edged sword. While it gives Imus a certain gravitas (isn’t he actually in the Broadcasting Hall of Fame?), it also holds him up to a higher standard. Would anyone blink if Stern had talked about “nappy headed ho’s?”
I don’t know if what Imus said about the Rutgers women’s basketball team was qualitatively worse than many of the other things that have been said by him and his cohosts. Perhaps the outcry over this most recent bit of hatefulness is sort of like Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award for The Departed—it’s more of a recognition of his lifetime achievement in the field than a response to the particular episode.

And like Scorsese’s Oscar, it’s long overdue.

Which is part of why I find it so disturbing that otherwise thoughtful, decent people continue to appear on his program and, worse yet, defend him even after this latest ugliness. I mean, for crying out loud, even Tom Oliphant claimed “solidarity” (yes, he used that word) with Imus just yesterday! Say it ain’t so!

And he’s apparently only one (and, to me at least, the most disappointing) of a growing number of members of the “I Heart the I-Man” club.

It’s time, past time in fact, for those who form the thunderhead of Imus’s semiotic cloud to disperse and fall like rain. There are venues and hosts more deserving of their time and talent.

Limbaughtomy

There must be a word for it.

There must be a technical term for a figure of speech that violates the very precept on which it’s based. Irony is sort of close, but that’s when the speaker knowingly says something at odds with the intended meaning. I’m looking for something that’s done without knowing it.

Hypocrisy is closer, but it’s a bit too broad. It refers to saying something that’s at odds with what the speaker does, thinks, or says in other circumstances. What I’m talking about is when the very statement is at odds with itself.

Paradox sort of captures it, but not quite. It suggests more of a puzzling quandary than a straightforward violation of a statement’s own content.

With the litany of Greek-based terms for rhetorical figures, you’d think that there’d be one that would label this phenomenon clearly. Perhaps there is, but I’m not aware of it.

Maybe one could be invented. To dust off my knowledge of Greek, maybe it would be called something like “autoparabaistis”— which would translate to something like “self violation” or “self transgression.”

Or maybe we could simply call such phrases examples of “Limbaughtomy.” It has a Greek ring to it, and the similarities with “lobotomy” add a nice touch.

This question came up after seeing reports of a recent example of such self-violation by Rush Limbaugh.

Commenting on the recent announcement by John and Elizabeth Edwards that her cancer has returned and that they still plan to go ahead with the presidential campaign, Limbaugh vomited forth the following:

Political people are different than you and I. And, you know, most people when
told a family member's been diagnosed with the kind of cancer Elizabeth
Edwards has, they turn to God. The Edwards turned to the campaign. Their
religion is politics and the quest for the White House.

Normally, taking Limbaugh's banal rhetoric apart would be beneath the dignity of this website, but the ugliness of this particular remark deserves a riposte. So, let the flensing begin.

It’s bad enough that Limbaugh accuses the Edwards, people I assume he doesn’t know personally, of unspeakable crassness, but in doing so, Limbaugh commits the very crassness he accuses them of: using a personal tragedy for political purposes.

To paraphrase Limbaugh, most people, when told that someone has incurable cancer, show compassion; Rush showed malignance (play on words intended). Putting political point-scoring (and relatively meaningless point-scoring at that) ahead of basic decency, Limbaugh attacked people he doesn’t know as Godless power-grubbers, and he does so for no other reason than the pleasure of doing it. This kind of vituperative rhetoric is, dare I say it, an addiction for El Rushbo.

It would be nice to simply write him off, as Keith Olbermann does, as a “comedian.” But to many millions of Americans, he’s not a comedian—he’s their primary connection to the public sphere.

Yet how do even Limbaugh’s fans not recognize the inherent idiocy of politicizing a woman’s cancer by attacking her and her husband of politicizing it?

The answer, I suppose, lies in the question itself: they’re Rush Limbaugh fans.

Some issues to discuss:

Do you think Limbaugh actually believes what he’s saying, or is this truly empty political rhetoric for its own sake?

To any Limbaugh listeners, do *you* really believe what Limbaugh said?

Disregarding the morally bankrupt and logically self-destructing comments of Limbaugh, to what extent does Elizabeth Edwards’s diagnosis affect what can and can’t be said of John Edwards?

The Past Is Gone . . . But Is It Forgotten?

In the space of just a few hundred words during his latest remarks to the press, Bush used the word “sober” twice. Such fondness for this adjective calls to mind certain peccadilloes of the president’s past that might help explain his problems with remembering time.



If there’s anything the president didn’t want to call to his audience’s attention during his remarks about the Congressional Iraq spending legislation, it’s the past—with the obvious exception of September 11, 2001, which was mentioned twice. The president’s remarks revolve around the present and future alone (a future in which, according to him, the stingy “Democrat [sic] party” will undermine the troops by cutting money from the troops—never mind that the bill gives plenty of money to the military, with the caveat that there be some plan for getting them the hell out of Iraq in the foreseeable future).

Why should this be the case? I think the answer lies with one of the favored rhetorical techniques of this administration—one that only works if the pesky past is ignored: projecting one’s own faults onto others and attacking them (a process rhetorical scholar Kenneth Burke called “scapegoating”).

Burke suggested people often do this in a way of dealing with their inner tensions and conflicts. With the president, I doubt any deep psychodrama is getting plaid out. It’s politics, plain and simple.

Notice that Bush accuses Democrats in Congress of putting their own judgment ahead of that of military commanders, of not providing for the troops, and wasting money.

Now, let’s remember that the administration ignored the pleas of the Pentagon to focus on Afghanistan rather than ramp up for an unnecessary invasion of Iraq, ignored (for utterly political reasons) the estimates of high ranking military officials saying hundreds of thousands of troops would be necessary to properly secure the country, sent tens of thousands of combat troops into the maelstrom of Iraq without proper body armor or fully armored humvees, gave cushy corporate no-bid contracts to companies chummy with the administration, staffed the reconstruction effort in Iraq with neophyte GOP operatives rather than qualified staff, etc., etc., etc. (See the fantastic book Fiasco by Tom Ricks for all the appalling details.)

The shamelessness with which Bush levels these attacks at others without any attempt to cover his flanks rhetorically speaks volumes for his contempt of the American people’s collective memory and the willingness of the press to do their homework (and their job). On the latter point, he certainly has reason for his overconfidence. On the former, he’d best be more careful.

And as for “winning this war” (as the president puts it), let’s remind ourselves of a couple of things.

First, what “war” is he talking about? Whatever war might have been fought has long since been won, for whatever it might be worth. If “war” describes our current situation in Iraq, the president is duty bound to move for not a “surge” of 20,000 troops, but a massive mobilization to occupy the country. What possible excuse could there be not to?

Well, that it’s not truly a war. And he’d be right. What we’ve got is an occupation (of sorts). The war, to the extent it exists, is a civil war among various factions in Iraq, with the U.S. in the middle. And with most Iraqis wanting us out of their country, and around half saying it’s just fine to kill American troops, what possible purpose can it truly serve to have soldiers sitting in the middle of it all?

“War” is a term the president invokes when it suits his purposes politically. He doesn’t believe it’s truly a war, nor do his staunchest supporters. If they did, they’d be making the case for a huge occupation force to move in (the sort that was needed in the first place). But they don’t.

A related point is that, whatever you might want to call the situation in Iraq (“quagmire” is an overused but accurate candidate), 20,000 troops is not going to solve it. They weren’t meant to. And the relatively toothless Congressional bills recently passed don’t do much either. Instead, we’ve got a game of political hot potato (that’s “potatoe” for you Quayle fans out there) in which the administration attempts to keep things at an only mildly disastrous level until they are out of office. To actually *do* anything, either through massive escalation or pulling out of Iraq, would be politically risky. Better to fiddle while Baghdad burns, then, when decisions are forced on a future administration, blame them for whatever nightmare unfolds (and it *will* unfold, one way or another).

Congress, for its part, is doing largely the same thing. The benchmarks and timeline ostensibly provide a chance for troops to be brought home before the next presidential election, but the bills don’t hold the president’s feet to the fire.

The president might be right that Congressional Democrats are putting politics over meaningful action on Iraq, but they are doing it only to the extent that the president himself is trying to run out the clock and pass the mess he’s created for no earthly purpose on to his successors.

But with each tick of the clock, the chimes strike midnight for more U.S. soldiers and Iraqi men, women, and children.

Bush Under the Klieg Lights

Metaphors say a lot about a text, particularly when the they aren’t meant to be obviously “metaphorical.” That is, the underlying metaphorical structure of a text structures the understanding of the message in important ways.

One of the basic ways this comes out in texts is the appeal to sensory metaphors. Bill Clinton “felt” our pain. I might “see” your point. Or I could “hear” where you’re coming from. Something might “smell fishy” about what you say, or it could carry a “whiff” of desperation. I could even leave a bad taste in my mouth.

We use these metaphors so often that they often don’t seem much like metaphors at all.
I’d suggest that in President Bush’s most recent bit of damage-control rhetoric in his statement and answers about the firing of several U.S. attorneys, we see two fundamental sensory metaphors at work: sight and sound. The way Bush develops them says a lot about his attitude toward his audience and the issue at hand.

A specific phrase Bush used twice In his statement and answers during his press conference called attention to this. In talking about how it would be a horrible thing to call administration officials to testify under oath, Bush alluded to putting “the klieg lights” on these poor, hardworking folk.

When Bush uses such a specific bit of phraseology more than once in a short space, you can bet it’s something he’s been told to invoke. And in this case, I think it fits in with a wider way of couching the sacked-attorney issue.

Specifically, if you look at Bush’s comments, you’ll notice a lot of “visual” language. Administration officials shouldn’t have to suffer under the “klieg lights.” The Democratic call for sworn testimony “shows some appear more interested in scoring political points than in learning the facts.” In fact, Bush says they seem to be asking for “show” trials. The resignations of the attorneys have become a “public spectacle.” The attorneys are “being held up to scrutiny.” Democrats “view” this episode as an opportunity to score political points rather than “finding out” the truth. If they continue in pressing for subpoenas, the opportunism of the Democrats will be “evident for the American people to see.” Rather than being taken in by the “appearance” of something, Americans should “listen to the facts.”

That last phrase is interesting. Along with loads of visual language, Bush also uses metaphors of hearing, talking, and listening. White House officials and Attorney General Gonzales are going to “explain” the truth to members of Congress. Bush has “heard” the allegations, but the American people need to “hear the truth” (a phrase he uses three separate times, in addition to “explain the truth”). Twice, he begins a statement by commanding his audience to “Listen.”

A lot of public talk includes metaphors of sight and sound. As we’ve established, we use these phrases all the time without thinking about them. What’s interesting to me is how differently the sight and sound metaphors are used.

Even just looking at the examples above, the visual metaphors tend to be negative. It’s wrong to haul administration officials out under the “klieg lights.” But if the Democrats continue refuse the president’s offer and demand subpoenas, the American people will “see” what they’re really after. Viewing is seen as an act of aggression—something that subjects the object (rightly or wrongly) to the scrutiny of the viewer.

On the other hand, speech and sound metaphors are used in positive ways. “Hearing” is the way the president assures us we will get the truth. It will be “explained” to us. Just “listen” to the president, and the facts will become known.

I’m not saying all these instances are planned. On the contrary, I think many of them are unconscious choices by the president and/or his handlers in prepping for this press conference.
But that makes them all the more interesting. The visual=negative; hearing=positive relationship in the text, while not perfect, is strong—far too strong to be mere chance.
I suggest that this has to do with the nature of the senses involved. As I said above, to be seen is a passive thing. The one who gazes at us holds the power of how long to look and for what. If you want, you can go all post-modern, Michel Foucault with this and talk about how observation or surveillance is the essence of power.

Being heard, though, is something quite different. As the late psychologist Julian Jaynes noted, to listen is in a sense to obey. It is the speaker who controls a situation, not the listener. The power relationship between the sender and receiver of the signal are nearly the reverse in a speaker/hearer relationship than they are in a viewed/viewer relationship.

So, in a speech in which Bush is attempting to characterize investigations into the attorney-firing scandal as politically motivated and to stonewall Congressional attempts to get sworn, recorded testimony from administration officials, should it surprise us that Bush tells us to “listen” to him and to his subordinates as they “explain” themselves so that we can “hear” the truth? Should it surprise us that, when it comes to the truth about Democrats on the other hand, Americans will “see” what their motivations are, that Democrats in Congress will “show” us what they’re after?

The metaphorical world that emerges from Bush’s remarks conjures up a world in which viewing is an act of aggression that is unfair when it is applied to those who are blameless (the poor attorneys who are being held up to “scrutiny” or the administration officials called out under the “klieg lights”), but is useful for getting at the truth about those who aren’t forthcoming with it (i.e., the Democrats who will “show” themselves for what they are). Such people deserve—indeed, must—be subjected to the powerful gaze of the truthseeker.

On the other hand, to find the truth about those who are forthcoming (i.e., the administration), no such aggressive acts are necessary. In fact, truth comes from listening to these people. These people hold power justly, and can be trusted to “explain” the truth to us, provided we “listen” to them. If we do, we’ll “hear the truth.” No need to scrutinize them.

And for God’s sake, don’t put them under those cursed klieg lights!

Some questions for thought:

Another obvious dichotomy Bush’s remarks draw is between the “reasonableness” of his own offer and the “partisan” and “political” motivations of the Democrats. Any thoughts on ways Bush uses language to draw this picture for us?

Is there anything to be made about how Bush places himself in the narrative he tells? Occasionally, he seems to put himself in the background (such as referring to “the White House” rather than to himself). Other times, he asserts himself quite powerfully, such as saying “I named them all [i.e., the attorneys].” Is there a pattern?

Twice in response to the first question he’s asked, Bush uses the odd locution that “there is no indication” that “anyone did anything improper.” Again, the repetition of exact language suggests something premeditated about the word choice. What should we make of this phrasing?

More info on “Gonzales-Gate”:

Washington Post
ABC News
Guardian U.K.
Media Matters
NPR
Center for American Progress

Recommended Reading at Salon.com

There's a provocative piece in Salon today on the intellectual sterility of contemporary conservatism. Using the latest bit of hate mongering from Ann Coulter as a jumping off spot, the essay suggests that Coulter is simply one of the more high-profile examples of what the right wing in general has to offer: hatred and resentment (hence the fact that she can say anything, no matter how hateful, and not be abandoned by conservatives).

While the essay doesn't use terms like "rhetoric" or "discourse," that's essentially exactly what it's about. It's a short but good read. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.

A few questions I've started to mull over and would like to hear thoughts on:

Is the piece overly simplistic? Does it engage in the kind of characterization that it accuses conservative rhetoric of using?

What is the appropriate liberal/progressive rhetorical response to conservatives? Is it enough to let it eventually crumble on its own (as the author suggests it will), or are there positive, rhetorical moves Democrats can make to dismantle it? Is any progressive on the political scene doing that?

To the extent that Americans have fallen for this, why is that?

To any conservatives who might stop by, how do you feel about folks like Coulter, Limbaugh, Savage, et. al. being the most visible faces of your movement? Do you tend to agree with them? Are the necessary embarassments? Or are they simply embarassments that are beneath the dignity of a party that lays claim to a distinctive intellectual history? In short, do you think conservatism *has* made a "deal with the devil?"

Callin’ Out Cousin Pookie: Clinton and Obama’s Rhetoric at Selma

For a while, some of the right-wing folks had me intrigued.

The talk of Hillary Clinton suddenly taking on a Southern accent during her speech last week at Selma was on the lips of conservative talking heads across the country—just one more example, they suggested, of her cold and calculated political maneuvering.

And if Clinton had done that, it would be fascinating (although the fact that she lived for years and years in Arkansas would make it a bit less dramatic than it seems at first glance).

But then I saw excerpts of her speech, and from what I could tell, the only part when she dipped into anything like a Southern dialect was when she was quoting from an African American spiritual that contained some idiomatic Black English. The only thing that would make Hillary sound even dopier than suddenly taking on a Southern twang would be to recite Black dialect in her typical upper Midwest accent. That she tried to give the lines a more appropriate reading speaks to her rhetorical common sense, not her calculating manner.

But while conservative commentators predictably let their anxieties and antipathy get in the way of thoughtful critique, there is something interesting to be said about the Clinton/Obama dueling speeches in Selma.

I suspect that no matter what happens in 2008, these speeches will be the subject of many a rhetorical critique exercise in political science and communication courses. What makes them fascinating is that the situations were so parallel that you have almost a pure comparison of rhetorical styles. Clinton and Obama spoke on the same day, in African American churches only blocks apart, on the same general topic (the anniversary of the 1965 civil rights march at Selma). Their audiences were largely similar, and their purposes also paralleled each other: both were speaking in the context of running for their party’s presidential nomination, and both wanted make the case that they had connections to the soul of the African American community. To do this, both had to overcome a sense that they were separated from that community by a wide gulf of social class, geography, and (even in Obama’s case) race.

Clinton had to overcome the perception that, unlike her husband, she was a typical limousine liberal without a genuine attachment to the concerns of Southern African Americans. Obama had to overcome the notion that he was somehow not “Black enough,” and perhaps not African American at all, in the usual sense, since he is not the descendent of slaves.

There’s a lot that can and will be said about how each candidate handled their parallel challenges. To get the ball rolling, I’d like to invoke the name of Kenneth Burke, perhaps the most famous American rhetorical scholar.

You might have run into Burke’s ideas if you’ve taken a college-level composition class in the last 20-30 years or so. Many freshman writing texts mention Burke’s “Pentad” in terms of finding ideas or angles on a subject you want to write about.


Burke’s pentad is a grouping of five (obviously) terms: act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose. They basically boil down to asking questions about an event: What is happening? Who is doing the action? How are they doing the action? Where/when is the action taking place? What is the action intended to accomplish?

In some ways, these parallel the typical “reporters questions:” who, what, when, where, why, and how. The main difference is that reporters ask their questions about the events themselves. Burke’s Pentad primarily targets what people say about the events.

One of Burke’s suggestions is that in any piece of rhetoric, there are usually two terms of the five that emerge as the central tension. And these two terms exist in a “ratio” that privileges one over the other. Which of the two terms is privileged changes the character of the rhetoric (e.g., a speech that privileges act over agency will be different than one that privileges agency over act).

In the case of the Clinton and Obama speeches, it’s obvious that scene plays a major role in both speeches. They are giving speeches in Selma about an event that happened there. Their audience includes people who actually participated in this event. They speak in African American churches that evoke the genesis of the Civil Rights movement. When speakers are commemorating an event at or near the site of that event, it’s a safe bet that “scene” is going to be one of the central terms.

So, the next question is what is the other half of this central ratio of terms in each speech?

I suggest that Clinton and Obama’s speeches pair “scene” up with two different terms, and for understandable reasons. These choices shape the very different speeches they give.

In Clinton’s case, her speech centers on the purpose/scene ratio (with “purpose” being the dominant term). Obama’s speech centers on the act/scene ratio (with “act” being the dominant term).

Why is this?

To quote a fairly widely used introductory text on rhetorical criticism (Modern Rhetorical Criticism by Hart and Daughton), speeches in which “purpose” dominates “scene” (such as Clinton’s) tend to focus on the general feelings and intentions of the people who participated in the event rather than the specific situation of the community these people came from. Such a speech “argues that one’s feelings and thoughts are of such importance that they override social and other consequences.”

And that’s exactly what we see in Clinton’s speech. She often abstracts the specific motivations of the marchers to talk about their general commitment to social justice, and how the march, while ostensibly about civil rights for African Americans in the 1960s, was really a fight for equality in general. Clinton goes so far as to say that she might not have been able to run for president had it not been for the blow for equality the 1965 marchers struck.

Speeches in which “act” dominates “scene” (such as Obama’s) focus on the “freely chosen activities” of the people who participated in the event. Such a speech “describes a person or group’s behavior as being of such heroic proportions that the actions of others pale in comparison.”

And that’s what we see in Obama’s speech. He praises those who marched and bemoans the fact that “we might have lost something” since then, that the current generation might not have the same fortitude and commitment as the 1965 marchers. He, too, links himself to the marchers, but takes this link to a much more concrete level than does Clinton. Rather than simply aligning his own general political values with those of the marchers, he says he might not even exist, literally, if it hadn’t been for that march.


What this reveals is that despite the almost identical situations Clinton and Obama faced, as well as the shared obstacle of creating a sense of identity between themselves and a community they didn’t obviously belong to, the rhetorical options open to Obama were wider than those for Clinton. In the end, Obama, while perhaps not “Black enough” for some, *is* identified as Black. If we grant that race is a social construct, Obama fits into that construct, at least for most. Clinton, of course, does not (despite the fact that some have argued that her husband, despite his pigmentation, did fall into that social construct in important ways).

This cannot he more clear than in the section of Obama’s speech in which, after noting that the current generation might not be adequately filling the shoes of the ’65 marchers, he chides today’s generation (and, implicitly, today’s generation of African Americans) for a lack of motivation. This is a move Clinton could never make.

This culminates in the following excerpt from Obama’s speech:

We got power in our hands. Folks are complaining about the quality of our
government, I understand there's something to be complaining about. I'm in
Washington. I see what's going on. I see those powers and principalities have
snuck back in there, that they're writing the energy bills and the drug laws.
We understand that, but I'll tell you what. I also know that, if cousin
Pookie would vote, get off the couch and register some folks and go to the
polls, we might have a different kind of politics . . . We have too many
children in poverty in this country and everybody should be ashamed, but don't
tell me it doesn't have a little to do with the fact that we got too many
daddies not acting like daddies. Don’t think that fatherhood ends at conception.
I know something about that because my father wasn't around when I was young and I struggled.

If you think Clinton got raked over the coals for using a bit of Black dialect, what do you think would’ve happened had she invoked “cousin Pookie?”

Throughout the speech, Obama identifies himself with his audience, using “we” again and again. (Obama’s speech uses some version of the first person more than 50% more frequently than does Clinton’s). He breaks down the supposed barriers between his own past and the past of his mostly African American audience by talking about his own fatherless childhood, as well as the fact that his father faced discrimination in Africa similar to that faced by African Americans in the U.S.

While both Clinton and Obama attempt to forge an identity with their audience and with the people and events of 1965 (including, in both cases, dipping into the rhetorical style of African American sermons), they ultimately do it in different ways because of the essential difference in their separation from that community. Obama’s autobiography allows him to more clearly tie himself to the marchers and to his audience, hence the more specific focus on those who marched and our indebtedness to them. For Clinton, the color of her skin is an obstacle that can’t be ignored or talked away. She must settle for a broader, gauzier, sense of identity that focuses on shared abstract principles.

Not only does this affect the way Obama and Clinton create a sense of shared identity with their audience, but also what they can do with it. As we’ve seen, Obama can offer critique from an insider’s point of view; he can chide and goad his audience in a way that would be unthinkable for Clinton. He can do this because of his insider status.

If nothing else, this tells us a lot about the power of race in American political discourse. As much as we might like to think such boundaries have faded, they still offer insurmountable obstacles that must be negotiated carefully by rhetors.

Despite the length of this post, there’s tons more that could be said about these speeches, even just from the standpoint of the pentad-based analysis I’ve sketched out here. A close reading of the speeches reveals a great deal more. And any number of other approaches would likely reveal lots of good insights as well. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the speeches.

Some questions to ponder and comment on, if you feel like it:

Do you have a sense that either/both Clinton and Obama were being “inauthentic” in their speeches?

Would Bill Clinton have more rhetorical room to maneuver if he had been in his wife’s position? Why?

What other terms of the Pentad do you feel are in play in either/both speeches?

Do you think there would be a significant difference in the level of African American involvement and support for the Democratic ticket in 2008 if the nominee were Obama rather than Clinton?

Did Hillary Clinton have any more “baggage” to overcome in forging a sense of identity with her audience than other white politicians (e.g., John Edwards)? Less?

Generally, how did you personally respond to the speeches? There different situations aside, did you feel one clearly delivered the superior speech?