Troping Arizona

I'm experimenting witha new presentation tool called Prezi.  Click here, and then hit the forward arrow whenever you want to change "slides."

This is the very first time I've messed with this, so it's pretty rough.  Now that I know a bit better about how to use it, I think I can make this style of presentation work a bit better. But it beats PowerPoint.

Peace

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 Meaning of Saturday

We’re meaning-making animals. That’s what we do. We’re good at it. We’ve been practicing since the first human capable of reflective thought looked up at the sun and wondered why it was there. Must be a reason, right?


The massacre in Arizona, like any tragedy, goads us to look for a meaning behind it all. If one doesn’t present itself tout-de-suite, we start constructing them ourselves. We can’t help it. It’s what we do.

Our attempts to make meaning from the world can be sublime or grotesque. They can take the form of the Sistine Chapel or the ravings of Glenn Beck. Even the incoherent blatherings of the shooter himself show a damaged human mind struggling to impose some sort of meaning on life’s flux.

The hemming and hawing going on in the media today show the good, the bad, and the ugly of our penchant for meaning-making. We hear people on both sides try to fit the gelatinous goo that are the shooter’s published ruminations into a mold (hopefully one that matches that of an ideology we do not cotton to ourselves). “He read the Communist Manifesto! He’s a liberal!” “He read Ayn Rand! He’s a tea-bagger!”

Talk about a fool’s errand. It ain’t happening. There’s no “there” there.

Americans Want to Be More Like Sweden

A just-published study by economics and business professors from Duke and Harvard shows that Americans have little to no idea how unevenly wealth is distributed in this country. Moreover, Americans across ideological and economic spectrums, *want* there to be a more equitable distribution of wealth. When given a blind taste test using pie charts representing various divisions of wealth, more than 9 out of 10 Americans said they’d rather live in a country with a distribution of wealth like Sweden’s than live in one like the United States. Sweden: tastes great, less exploitation!

 

No doubt, some will claim this study is trying to foment “class warfare.” I always get a kick when I hear wealthy conservatives cry about “class warfare” anytime someone mentions that a more equitable and rational fiscal policy might be appropriate. It’s sort of like Hitler blaming Britain and France for starting World War II because they declared war on Germany, when all Germany did was merely invade Poland. Creating a system in which the wealthiest Americans are given every advantage above and beyond what their mere accumulation of resources provides is just fine and dandy, but having the temerity to point this out is “class warfare.” Priceless.

 

One way of creating a society more in line with what the majority of Americans across the political and economic spectrum would like would be a much more progressive tax system (something more like we had in the 1990s, or even more so in the 1950s, both times of incredible prosperity). Unfortunately, the powers that be have created a system in which a hedge fund manager pays the same functional tax rate as the sanitation worker or school teacher.

 

But isn’t that fair? Wouldn’t that be the answer? Have everyone taxed at the same rate? After all, that would mean that the wealthiest people *would* pay more in terms of raw dollars. It’s so equitable, so elegant, so . . . much b.s.

 

If the fact that the biggest proponent of instituting a flat tax rate is Steve “Moneybags” Forbes doesn’t cause you to be suspicious, consider the following points:

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.

Public opinion and the war in Afghanistan

Interesting article by Glenn Greenwald on the lack of public support for the continued occupation of Afghanistan, which brings up the question (and it's not necessarily a simple one): when is it okay for a democracy to continue military actions when the majority of its populace doesn't want it to?

Public opinion and the war in Afghanistan