Epitaphios Logos

Yesterday, I guessed that there would be an enormous number of responses from rhetorical scholars to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday in the months and years to come. Because I am what I am, I’m going to take an initial pass at placing the speech (and Palin’s) into the context of rhetorical scholarship, at least in one specific way.


One of the first things to notice about Obama’s speech is that it falls into a genre: the funeral or memorial oration. A lot of great speeches, from Pericles’ Funeral Oration that Thucydides offers us in his History of the Peloponnesian War to the Gettysburg Address to President Reagan’s speech following the Challenger disaster.

As the reference to Pericles suggests, the funeral oration as a genre of oratory goes back to ancient Greece, Athens in particular. In Greek, the term for these kinds of speeches was epitaphios logos.

Obama's Speech: An Initial Look

I'm postponing for a day or two my promised (threatened?) thoughts on how to talk about how and why the Arizona shooting stands in a particular symbolic relationship to larger events.  In the wake of President Obama's speech last night, I've been thinking quite a bit about why it was as effective as it was (already being touted as one for the history books). 

My guess is that there will be plenty of panels at the National Communication Association convention next year (as well as many other presentations and journal articles) devoted to looking not only at Obama's speech from any number of perspectives, but in comparison with the statement from Sarah Palin issued hourse before.

I'll take an initial stab at that tomorrow, but I wanted to pass along a bit of quick-and-dirty rhetorical analysis that appeared in todays Guardian.  They did a word count on the number of times specific words showed up in each speech and the percentage of the total text that this represented.

The Uber-Wealthy Divide and Conquer

A few trenchant observations from one of Robert Reich's latest columns:

"Wall Street and top corporate executives have grown even richer than they were before the Great Recession, even though most Americans are getting poorer or losing their jobs and homes and savings, and more Americans are in poverty."

"The super-rich say the nation can't afford any of this because of budget deficits. Yet at the same time their platoons of lobbyists are fighting off efforts to treat their income as taxable earnings rather than capital gains. So last year the 400 richest families in America, with an average income of $300 million each, were taxed at an average rate of only 17 percent. That's the same tax rate paid by a family earning $30,000."

"Wealth and power in this country are so distorted that the top 25 hedge-fund managers each earned an average of $1 billion last year. $1 billion would support 20,000 classroom teachers. Yet who contributes more to this country — a hedge-fund manager or a teacher?"

This comes in the context of bemoaning why President Obama wasn't more forceful about calling out the uber-wealthy and their minions in his recent town hall meeting about the economy. Instead, Obama asked the Tea Party crowd to come up with specific ideas for reducing the deficit.


File that one under "be careful what you wish for" (e.g., ending Social Security, stopping jobless benefits, gutting Medicaid, etc.).


Reich's got a point. The more I think about this issue of conflict and how it's framed rhetorically, the more I come to the conclusion that a great many of the apparent conflicts we see aren't really between the supposedly obvious antagonists at all, but between two other entities with hazier identities. My favorite example is that it seems the real divide in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is not between Israelis and Palestinians, or between Jew and Arab, but between those who sincerely want to find a mutual peace and those who prefer conflict (or who at least only see victory/defeat) as the possible outcomes. It's not a divide that's easily marked along geographic, ethnic, or religious lines; it's one that you see only in the heart and, to a lesser extent, in actions.

Obama's Peaceable (and Sensible) Ground Zero Mosque Rhetoric

A bunch of folks, including the sometime/part-time governor of Alaska, have accused President Obama of being either A) wrong in his remarks about the “Ground Zero” mosque, or B) unclear or contradictory in his remarks. Neither of these accusations is true. In fact, Obama’s statements on this issue have been entirely correct morally and factually and also entirely consistent. I’d add that I think they are a great example of what “peaceful” rhetoric can be.



Obama said on Friday that Muslims, like anybody else in America, are completely free to practice religion in any way they see fit, as long as they do so within the context of the law. On Saturday, he pointed out that he had *not* said anything one way or the other about the “wisdom” of building this particular mosque, but simply that it was absolutely within the law to do so.


Would we want a president to say anything other than this? The entire purpose of having freedom of religion enshrined in the Bill of Rights is precisely to point out that it doesn’t make a bit of difference what anyone-- you, I, or even the president—thinks about someone else’s right to practice their religion. It’s not a matter of opinion or majority rule. You get to worship God (or not) the way you want to, particularly on your own property. No one, and I mean no one, can possibly offer an argument that says the government could or should interfere with the building of this mosque. At least, no one can offer an argument that would be consistent with well over two centuries of Constitutional law as well as the most basic tenets of the American form of government.

God Help Us . . . Please!

I came across this story about right-wing pastors engaging in “imprecatory prayer,” which involves asking for the death of someone, that someone in this case being President Obama.

A lot of interesting questions arise. If we had (as many of those practicing imprecatory prayer would like) a system of government overtly based on Christian principles, would such a prayer constitute treason? That is, if we as a nation believed that intercessory prayer has real power, wouldn’t this sort of prayer be considered not only treason, but attempted assassination?

For that matter, given that these ministers believe in the power of prayer, might they not be committing treason in the good ol’ fashioned secular sense? Just wondering.

And if, God forbid (a little counter-imprecatory prayer for ya), some wingnut took a potshot at the president and was doing it to help fulfill what he/she saw as God’s will, would these theological hooligans be held accountable for publically asking God to kill Obama?

Interesting questions all, none of which I have the answer to. Nor do I have an answer to the more fundamental question (at least in my mind): why one would ever pray for the death of another human being?

Think of all the things one *could* pray for instead, no matter how virulent one’s disgust with the current president’s policy might be. You could pray for his heart to be turned and his mind changed. You could pray that the American people not be swayed by him. You could pray that Congress does not pass legislation championed by the president.

You might even simply pray that God bring about whatever is right and pleasing to Him, acknowledging that in your imperfect knowledge, you cannot know with certainty what is ultimately right or wrong. Isn’t “Thy will be done” the only truly proper intercessory prayer?

I have a sneaking suspicion that even if Christ Himself came back and announced he was for universal healthcare (and some might say he more or less did just that the first time around), there are those who are so ideologically opposed to the idea that even this wouldn’t sway them.

That’s obviously their right. But could we at least avoid invoking God as the Hitman on High to kill people with whom we have a difference of opinion on public policy? Do we want to adopt the theology of Tony Soprano?

God, I hope not.

Peace.

Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize/Goad

I just heard about President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize.




My first thought was, “Wow! Cool!”



My second thought is, “I hope he earns it.”



In the five minutes it’s been since first hearing the news, the few comments I’ve heard, both in pro and anti Obama camps, is puzzlement about why the president would receive this award after being in office only a few months.



I’ll throw out one possible answer, one that I think makes some sense.



I suspect the award is meant more as a goad than as a reward. Obama’s vision for the world and America’s place in bodes well for a move toward a more peaceful planet where even the most entrenched enmities might be transcended. At the very least, we can hope that we try for such transcendence before relying on the half-measure of compromise or the utter failure of war. Peace is no longer a dirty word, as it often has been in this country of late.



Having said that, Obama is considering ramping up troop levels in Afghanistan. The occupation of Iraq continues. Abolishing nuclear weapons is something that’s talked about, but hasn’t been done.



A few months into office, Obama is now having to make the actual decisions that will determine whether the reality of his presidency lives up to the rhetoric. I think the Nobel Prize committee knows this. By giving him the award, the committee also has placed a heavy burden on Obama’s shoulders: to live up to the epithet “Nobel Peace Prize Winner.”



While not impossible, it will be harder for “Nobel Peace Prize Winner” Barack Obama to send more combat troops to continue an occupation of a foreign country than it would for merely “President Obama.” It will be harder for “Nobel Peace Prize Winner” Barack Obama to cave in to pressure to deploy expensive and pointless weapons systems around the world than it would for “President Obama.” It will be harder for “Nobel Peace Prize Winner” Barack Obama to turn a blind eye to extraordinary rendition and torture than it would for “President Obama.”



To those who think that this prize is givens way too early, I agree insofar as the prize is meant to reward past actions. But if we see this action for what (in my opinion) it is, a persuasive act aimed moving Obama to fulfill the promise of peace he’s spoken about, I think the award, coming at just the time when the rhetorical rubber is hitting the road of reality, potentially does more to foster peace than it would if given for actions done five, ten, or twenty years ago.



Peace.