. . .the milkcrate. . .

2009 Conference on College Composition and Communication presentation...

The Hidden Bigotry of Authenticity:
Student-Athletes and Professors Playing the Identity Game
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Abstract

Increasingly, universities have developed programs attentive and solicitous towards a range of student demographics from “at-risk” to “gifted.” Often, student-athletes fit both criteria, though universities have been slow to recognize, and attend to, their liminal status as both high achievers and anxious learners. After two years of teaching rhetoric classes entirely comprised of varsity athletes, and three years mediating plagiarism cases for my department, I contend that the student-athlete is a pedagogic creature about whom instructors know too little, frequently leading them to approach with caution and suspicion, especially in the composition classroom. At the core of this suspicion is a jumble of bad reputation and misunderstanding about the distinctions between essential and constructed student-athlete identity, often translating into a disposition of lowered expectations and bias confirmation. This paper points out in the rhetorical sphere something well-established in sociolinguistics, that students, particularly minority students, develop habituated situational standards for switching code, and the lessons of most college classes in argumentation only amplify these processes. My goal is to open up discussion about how instructor understanding of student-athlete identity and ability can be more finely parsed in order to break bad pedagogic habits rooted in unforgiving and incomplete societal expectations.

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Because I do not wish coyly to bury the lead, I’m saying that we should not assume that student-athletes who sound and act one way on the field, another way in class, and a different way on the page are cheating, a principle to which I assume most teachers will readily subscribe. This clearly is not a particularly revelatory conclusion for most of us. Still, I am reminded of an instance when, during a plagiarism conference I mediated for my department, a colleague unflaggingly insisted that the African-American basketball player in her class could not have written the essay she turned in because it quote—“didn’t sound the way she talks”—unquote. Such common knowledge and anecdotal experience, sustained by glances through media sources both professional and popular, suggest that the stigmatizing of student-athletes persists: they are often considered, at best, academically underprepared, and, at worst, intellectually incompetent; they are often presumed to carry deep senses of entitlement drowning shallow interest in their schooling; as a result, their work is often viewed warily, the product of small doses of forced but lackluster effort aided by large doses of heavy-handed, scare-quoted tutoring. Like commercial airplane crashes, systemic academic malfeasance in big-league athletic departments, though infrequent, is reported with such wide reproach that scandal is perceived as their standard operating procedure. These suspicious attitudes envelop like a clinging fog the teaching and assessment of student-athletes with a judicial rather than a judicious air. Running contra to these negative constructions of student-athletes is what we might call an equally common stigmatizing of stigmatization: teachers telling their colleagues that, regarding their student-athletes, if they can’t convict, they must acquit.

I find the parallel but paradoxic presence of these attitudes towards student-athletes fascinating, especially because their complex and concurrent existences underscore what I argue is another, more basal paradox in many public spheres, popular, political, and pedagogic: we love authenticity, even as we know, though regularly pretend not to, that ‘authentic’ is a highly molten concept, liquid and often too hot to grasp. Authenticity here can be understood as the demand by teachers of their students for a stable projection of a stable self. We very much want the one bit of good advice Polonius gives Laertes, “to thine own self be true” (Act 1.3) to be true. In our composition classes as in the world beyond, however, we generally and often genially allow self to “dissolve,” quoting from John Trimbur, “into the semiosis of intertextuality” (283). Or, as Sharon Crowley explains at the beginning of her Methodical Memory, “the sovereign authoring subject” is “no longer useful as [a] theoretical resource for the teaching of composition” (xiv). But evidence still remains of our deep fixation on the authentic, our compulsion to seek out and reward authenticity, our drive to actually be authentic, and our desire for an unwavering authentic self. Authenticity is a concept we have moved beyond but cannot get past. The result is a sort of cognitive dissonance promoting discouraging and potentially damaging public decisions, especially those educational, but political and cultural ones as well. Exhibit ‘A’ may be the continued presence of the stigmatization of student-athletes, along with the reaction against such stigmatization.

Stigmatize is an appropriate term to apply to unexamined negative attitudes towards student-athletes in composition classes since its etymology denotes a physical ‘marking’ or ‘branding.’ Here, teachers and other students often ‘brand’ student-athletes as dumb and duplicitous because of their physicality. During one of the introductory rhetoric and writing courses I taught to an all-varsity-athlete class, a student and basketball player recounted to us his inability to convince his non-student-athlete peers that he did not receive answers to exams before the test dates. Instead, these peers demanded that he share with them his ill-gotten inside information. His student-athlete peers in our class all emphatically related to his tale, many recounting their own similar experiences of being negatively branded, despite never offering explicit confirmation of their student-athlete status. People could, they’d say, ‘just tell,’ a phenomenon they gamely laughed off.

Sociologist Julie Cheville exposes the anxieties behind this uncomfortable laughter in Minding the Body, her book-length study of a female college basketball team. She writes, “what student athletes most fear [is] that their athleticism will be appropriated and used against them by those who have the power to deny or devalue their presence” (4). So, while there is a longstanding connection in rhetorical studies between body and mind, the bond between the two has been all but broken in contemporary universities. In Bodily Arts, her study of rhetoric and athletics in ancient Greece, rhetorician Debra Hawhee describes what she calls the “curious syncretism” (195) between athletic training, resulting ‘good bodily disposition’ (euexia), and philosophic training, resulting in virtuosity (arête). Isocrates, in Antidosis, remarks that “These two disciplines are complementary, interconnected, and consistent with each other.” He continues, “They do not separate these two kinds of education but use similar methods of instruction, exercise, and other kinds of practices” (239). For Isocrates and the Greeks, the gymnasium was an entirely appropriate place to practice one’s progymnasmata.

But, for a variety of reasons, varsity athletics and collegiate scholastics are separated in most schools today, often to the detriment of students. Cheville claims that, for many student-athletes, “the conceptual orientation central to knowledge acquisition in sport [is] relatively useless in college classrooms that disassociate[s] cognition from concrete activity and interaction” (8). And, as pointed out in a recent psychological study focusing on the motivational processes of student-athletes by Althea Woodruff and Diane Schallert, most student-athletes “intertwine” (35) their academic and athletic “senses of self” (42, and passim) in complicated and not necessarily beneficial ways, in part because they are not always sure, and rarely asked to articulate, how the mind and body connect.

Many scholars have suggested, however, that there is a space in rhetoric and composition classes where body and mind—the corporeal and compositional selves—do intersect, for students and student-athletes alike. Unlike the historical virtuous associations between mind and body traced by scholars like Hawhee, this current intersection is largely considered oversimplified and overweening, especially in the wake of rigorous debates over author, author-function, and agency. As Susan Miller famously points out in Textual Carnivals, “Writing makes an object of a student’s language.” She continues, “Consequently, the practice of attending to mechanical errors allow[s] written texts to become instruments for examining the ‘body’ of a student . . . This attention allows a teacher . . . to examine the student’s language with the same attitude that controls a clinical medical examination.” Miller concludes, “In the continuing view that a student’s written language reveals personal flaws as readily as his speech, the quality of the student can be identified with the correct or incorrect quality of the student’s texts” (57).

Student work, in other words, is taken as student identity. This identity is taken as the student’s actual and only identity, though it is refracted through the class’s particular rhetorical situations and compositional processes, and unavoidably swayed by teacher assessment. A persona is taken to be the person. The reverse is also possible, particularly with minority and male student-athletes, when the person reflected in the student’s work fails to reflect the expected persona in the eyes of the teacher. Herein lies the bigotry of authenticity: a sort of asymmetric insight whereby many teachers believe they have the power and privilege over their students to discern, even  define, their students’s irreducible selves. Instead of telling students what they are doing, and how they are doing it, teachers attempt to tell students who they are. But, as Lionel Trilling once wrote, “criticism is not gossip.”

Indeed, Rebecca Moore Howard reminds us that “In rhetorical studies, ‘the systems of which one is part’ include subject formation.” “Reflexivity in rhetorical studies has,” she continues, “called attention to subject formation as fundamental precept and project of the discipline.” Moore concludes that, “subject formation might even be seen as a metanarrative for rhetorical and pedagogical studies” (349). I agree with Howard about the considerable significance of subject formation in composition classes, but I think the word ‘reflexive’ is potentially distressing. If ‘reflexive’ connotes the extent to which a student-athlete is expected to reflect a teacher’s a priori expectations, as in the instance with my disbelieving colleague and her basketball playing writer, we risk allowing the molten substance that is student identity to harden into something not just inauthentic but counterproductive, precisely the opposite of what this sort of logic hoped to accomplish. If, however, ‘reflexive’ connotes a student-athlete’s ability to assimilate then activate the missions of the class, trying out with reflection the various rhetorical and compositional strategies taught to them, we are, I think, getting close to the core of why we teach rhetoric and writing to our students. Composition and rhetoric classes, I’d argue, axiomatically ask students to try on new selves in order to expand what constitutes the self. Teachers, at their best, intend to improve their students—as writers, as citizens, as individuals—by improving their abilities to write and argue. But at their worst, teachers sometimes fail to see how such programs for improvement obligate them to give students space to flex and stretch their identities.

What I’m asserting is that, generally speaking, we worry too much about identity, when what we really mean is “identification” in Kenneth Burke’s sense of the concept. In his Rhetoric of Motives, Burke tells us that fundamentally rhetoric is the student’s ability to “persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea,” ultimately, “identifying your ways with his” (55). We worry too much about who a student-athlete is, or who we think he or she is, instead of concentrating on more pragmatically useful evaluations, like the student’s success in practicing identification while navigating rhetorical contingency. The tragedy of the bigotry of authenticity, then, is twofold. First, in our emphasis on the authentic, we may limit the opportunities for student-athletes, many of whom are already having a difficult time ‘intertwining’ their various selves, to fully exercise their agency. By agency I mean the microphysical capacity for students to, again quoting from Trimbur, “negotiate their ways of life” using “practical logic” (285). Second, we may fail to recognize that the student-athlete whose essay doesn’t “sound the way she talks” is, in fact, trying in her work to sound and act like us, since that is what most composition and rhetoric classes ask students to do.

Instead of trying to carry such a hefty concept as identity into our classrooms, I offer that a slower, diagnostic discussion of ethos works as a productive replacement. Aristotle, in Book 2 of On Rhetoric, calls ethos “almost … the most authoritative form of persuasion” (1356a.2-4), and conventionally understood components of Aristotelian ethos are useful concrete strategies for composition students. But since my contention is that most civic discourses, including many in the sphere of compositional pedagogy, emphasize rhetor authenticity over more constructive, though contingent, pragmatic characteristics, and since I think this overemphasis stems in part from a highly diluted, highly psychologized take on Aristotle’s conception of ethos, I am interested in reading Aristotelian ethos as drawing a distinction between being ‘ethical,’ and what I want to call being ‘ethotic.’ This distinction can be productively dissected in class.

Ethical carries a moral valence insisting that the students’s identity reflected in their writing be authentic, and made authentically available to audiences. On the other hand, ethotic asks ‘only’ that students present a situationally clear and appropriate identity with which their audience can identify for purposes of building transparent and transactional rhetorical relationships. The ethotic is unconcerned whether or not students’s identities match their authentic selves. Besides, to avoid coyness again, I am skeptical that an essential self even exists, especially in compositional pedagogy, despite beliefs in a stable self by classical philosophers, including Aristotle. The ethotic sidesteps this skepticism anyway because it is transparent about the constructed nature of a rhetor’s ethos. The ethical, conversely, demands of the rhetor a more constitutive identity. The ethotic is method; the ethical category. The ethotic is highly pragmatic, and thus, in my opinion, pedagogically useful, if we understand pragmatic to mean what William James calls an “attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ [and] supposed necessities,” and “looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, [and] facts” (27). It is too pat to suggest that Aristotle replaces classical conceptions of the sincerely ‘good man’ with an opposed ‘postmodern’ conception of the contingent self.  But it is clear in Book 2 that identity within civic discourse is not necessarily authentic, by which I hope to suggest both not required and not inevitable. Rather, it mostly depends on the situation. As Lester Faigley explains it in Fragments of Rationality, his useful book on subjectivity and composition, “The subject, like judgments of value and validations, has no grounding outside contingent discourses” (227).

So ethos, in the setting of our classes, is best understood as any form of what rhetorician Marshall Alcorn calls “self-structuring” by the student (16). Because he specifically highlights control of identity as a component of rhetoric, Alcorn’s usage opens space for students to practice composition contingently. It also addresses Trimbur’s ‘semiotic dissolution,’ since self-structuring forces rhetors to acknowledge and engage with the specter haunting ethos in the poststructuralist world: “It seems we cannot have at the same time,” Alcorn warns, “both a theory that explains the rhetor’s presence in a text and a theory that fully describes the plural disseminations of textual codes” (17). Alcorn sounds about right, yet despite the seismic effects Foucault’s ‘author-function’ (in “What is an Author?,” 1969) and Barthes’s ‘death of the author’ (in  S/Z, 1974) have had on literary theory, the strictness with which composition and rhetoric classes believe in and operate under these poststructural paradigms is perhaps overstated. While poststructuralism still seeps into the cracks, there is a thick wall of productive disagreement in composition studies over the extant author’s presence and consequence. Again, we accept that the concept of a stable, authentic author is troubled, even as we still want to know who wrote what and why. By engaging these troubling issues in class, the goal is not to draw conclusions, which is probably a fool’s errand. But I believe there is critical value in explicitly discussing with our students the raison d'être of contingency, along with its subsequent underwriting of identification over identity. These discussions are especially commodious for students who conspicuously feel the instability of identity in their day-to-day lives, including most student-athletes, even as they attempt to intertwine their various selves.

In the end, Howard’s claim that subject formation serves as the “metanarrative” for compositional and rhetorical studies provides a practical suggestion for teaching student-athletes. My experience is that student-athletes require and respond to meta-discussions about the obligations, attitudes, and actions towards schooling. Similarly, because of the inherent performative aspects of athletics, student-athletes possess an almost intuitive appreciation for rhetoric as it was originally described by classical rhetoricians like Aristotle and Isocrates: as techne, an art, rather than as episteme, knowledge. Hawhee succinctly characterizes this intuition as “chiasmatic,” the “immediate relationship between training practices and performance” (7).

There are convincing arguments against engaging in this sort of self-conscious meta-discussion with our students: as Amy Robillard points out, unlike compositional studies, “Students of other disciplines do not reflect the nature of the field itself. The discipline of astronomy, for example, studies the heavens; it does not study the students of astronomy” (42). While I appreciate Robillard’s concern, I argue that, even if composition classes are not really, or at least not most productively about identity, they are essentially and inevitably about people doing work. If astronomy students created stars in class instead of observing them, perhaps then we would find it more acceptable to engage in disciplinary conversations about the reflexive relationships between person and pulsar. Undeniably, the students writing in our classes are creating constellations of identifications and cosmologies of selves. For me, then, teaching this conflicted conversation about conflicted self does more than offer to students critical knowledge; it offers to teachers a gentle corrective against the hazard of assuming that, at least when it comes to knowing who our students are, we ‘know best.’

The 'We' in "Yes We Can..."

Though now it feels like ancient history, America’s fixation on Barack Obama’s candidacy and its concomitant messages of “hope” and “change” is still the most contemporaneous and richly representative example of the complicated and isochronous, though loosely documented, rhetorical transactions between political rhetors and audiences. By mapping the ethotic relationship between rhetors and their audiences, and theorizing how that relationship endures over time, I argue that we can expand our understanding and usage of ethos in the political sphere, and, by extrapolating and reapplying what we learn there, to the pedagogical, and, to a lesser extent, literary spheres as well.

For instance, twenty thousand people waited on the shores of Lady Bird Lake in Austin, Texas for nearly three hours on a cold and rainy Friday in February 2007 to hear the newly announced presidential candidate speak to them (transcript; video). Again: twenty thousand people showed up in the rain on a Friday—twelve months before the party primaries, and eighteen long months before the general election—to hear a man who, though an official candidate for less than two weeks, was already being dubbed a presumptive frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president, a presumption that has since proven accurate.

Though this scene has since been replicated hundreds of times, even Obama seemed surprised by the turnout in Austin that Friday: “Unbelievable,” he repeated absently into the microphone as he mounted the stage, adding “I have not seen a crowd like this. I am overwhelmed, Austin.” And then:

On February tenth, two Saturdays ago I stood in front of the old state capitol in Springfield, Illinois, a place where Abraham Lincoln has served and where he delivered his famous speech in which he said that a nation divided against itself could not stand. And he was an inspiration for all of us, but for me to be there and see seventeen thousand people in seven-degree weather was truly an inspiration, and it told me not that people were simply supporting my campaign, but it told me that people were ready for a change. That it wasn't just about me. And it was a humbling experience…

What followed is approximately fifty minutes of typical early election cycle panegyric, focusing on Obama’s particular ideology, his now famous “audacity of hope,” whereby hope is not “to ignore the problems in the world [in order] to be hopeful,” but is “to believe that the world as it is is not the world as it has to be:”

So I walk into the church, Trinity United Church of Christ, and the pastor there is a guy named Jeremiah Wright. And Dr. Wright was delivering a sermon titled the audacity of hope. And his basic idea was very simple. What he said was this. He said the easiest thing in the world is to be cynical. Nothing is easier than to say that the world is what it is, to watch the television and read the newspapers and see poverty, and strife, and violence, and war, famine, and to say there is nothing we can do about it.

That the best we can hope for is to protect ourselves and our families, to look after ourselves, to abandon the public life to those who are cynical, the special interests, the lobbyists, the people who will wield power only for their own benefit. What’s hard, what’s difficult, what’s bold, what requires risk, what’s audacious, is to hope.

It’s to believe that the world as it is is not the world as it has to be.

That we can close the gap between those two worlds if we apply hard work, and imagination, and diligence, and if we work together.

And I was inspired by that sermon, not only because I thought that it applied to my life, because it told me that you don't have to ignore the problems in the world to be hopeful. You simply have to be committed to bringing about change and doing everything you can to imagine a better world. But I was also inspired because I realized that the idea described the very essence of

America, that America at every stage always had the audacity to hope.

You think about it…*

Applause for Obama’s speech was approbatory and robust. But what, exactly, where those twenty thousand people applauding? Certainly one answer is that Obama was in for an even more humbling experience than he realized, since, like it our not, and despite his protestations, the audience’s enthusiasm is for him, and the campaign is about him. Those twenty thousand people were primed by prior knowledge to like Barack Obama, even without knowing his specific policy positions on key issues. First, there was his national coming out at the 2004 Democratic National Convention where, in his stump speech for John Kerry, he first introduced his doctrine of hope: “Hope — Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!” Then there were the releases of his two bestselling memoirs within half a year of each other, The Audacity of Hope in October 2006, and Dreams of My Father republished in January 2007 (originally published in 1995). There were promotional appearances on Oprah and The Today Show, and in the November 2004 issue of O Magazine, where he is labeled “someone [Oprah] wants you to get to know.” Major newspapers also helped people better know Obama through increasingly extensive coverage: between 1990 and 2003 Obama appears in the New York Times five times, four times in the Washington Post; between his first U.S. Senate bid in 2004 and the end of 2006, those numbers jump to approximately ninety-five appearances in both the Times and the Post. And between January and June 2007, they rocket again to 227 and 177 respectively. Since then, they have become too ubiquitous to count.

The expanding aggrandizement of media attention created, unsurprisingly, a potential energy that the Obama campaign, also unsurprisingly, hoped to channel with the February 2007 announcement of his candidacy. But Obama is not a cult of personality, at least not in the strictest sense where an individual deliberately consolidates power over a mass through the employment of a provocative and charismatic authority. Instead, the authority for harnessing the potential energy of prior knowledge rests with Obama’s audiences, who not only self-selected their connection with the candidate, but also, because of the perceptions generated from that prior knowledge, forcefully place Obama the man in a position central to the communicative transaction between them and him. Regardless of his desire that the presence of the large and excitable audience “wasn’t just about me,” the audience makes their presence “about” Obama; they place his textual intentions—wasn’t about me—into non-textual contexts informed by their prior experience and knowledge. This is a man, many might say to themselves, who Oprah wants me to get to know.

But it’s not as if Obama and his campaign team are totally without agency in this transaction. Despite his attempt to detach the movement from the man, as he does in his introduction when he claims that people’s readiness for change “wasn’t just about me,” Obama simultaneously embeds himself centrally, and in rarified presidential company, when he speaks of standing “in front of the old state capitol in Springfield, Illinois, a place where Abraham Lincoln has served and where he delivered his famous speech in which he said that a nation divided against itself could not stand.” Similarly, when he relates his response to Wright’s sermon on the “audacity of hope,” Obama’s intermixture of pronouns suggests a messenger more thoroughly involved in the message than simply serving as its conduit. “[W]e can close the gap between those two worlds if we apply hard work, and imagination, and diligence, and if we work together,” he stumps, suggesting what Kenneth Burke, in his Rhetoric of Motives, might consider a “consubstantial” request for “acting-together” (20-23). But Obama quickly returns to the first-person narrative that initiated the request: “I was inspired by that sermon, not only because I thought that it applied to my life, because it told me…,” and here we see another switch, this time to the second-person plural, “…that you don't have to ignore the problems in the world to be hopeful. You simply have to be committed to bringing about change and doing everything you can to imagine a better world” (emphases added). The switch is interesting because it emblematizes grammatically the realization Obama must have had, even intuitively, about his candidacy: that all campaigns—indeed, all political actions—ultimately come down to the candidate and the candidate’s ethos.

Ethos here is understood as any form of what Marshall Alcorn, in his essay "Self-Structure as a Rhetorical Device," calls “self-structuring” by the rhetor. Ethos, then, is defined by conventional Aristotelian devices, i.e., arête, eunoia, phronesis, that constitute what “may almost be called the most effective means for persuasion [a person] possesses” (W. Rhys Roberts, trans., Rhetoric, 1356a). And it is also defined by what Burke describes as the rhetor’s ability to “persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” (55). The “just” in Obama’s “wasn’t just about me,” then, is a not insignificant admission of Obama’s ethotic involvement. That said, the prior knowledge of those twenty thousand Austinites (and the twenty thousand people in the next city, and the next, all the way to his nomination) is also not insignificant, because, in many substantial ways, audiences are as involved in the construction of rhetors’s ethos as rhetors themselves.

Acting-together is admirable, and, as we will see, crucial to the self-conception of the Obama candidacy, but we need to admit that most politically exigent transactions are about acting out other people’s desires and demands: either voters acting out the desires of candidates through grassroots campaigning and casting ballots in their favor, or now-elected representatives acting out the desires of voters by crafting and enacting particularly beneficial policies. Obama’s speech in Austin in early 2007 is, of course, an example of the former, and the passages quoted above emblematize Obama’s, again, perhaps intuitive, construction of his own ethos, especially if we accept a standardized textbook definition of ethos that assumes the rhetor’s premeditated insertion of either her or his character into the rhetorical act before its public enactment.

What is less clear, I will argue, are the cognitive motivations and social mechanisms underwriting the interplay between the construction by, and of, the candidate and the perception, reception, and perpetuation of that construction by the electorate. Obama’s inspiration in the wake of the Wright sermon he summarizes leads to what we might consider his personal perspicuity about the obligations of civically literate (to crib a phrase from the outstanding Donald Lazere) and politically engaged Americans, i.e., commit to change, imagine a better world, and, finally, engage in grassroots action, including the most revolutionary aspect of his campaign, millions of micro-donations from thousands of individual supporters.

He immediately extends his insight beyond the individual: “But I was also inspired because I realized that the idea described the very essence of America; that America at every stage always had the audacity to hope.” Here is personal perspicuity’s view of the individual citizen enlarged to the level of totalized national history and political ideology: an appropriately prodigious and positive weltanschauung for a presidential candidate, considering all presidential candidates must have weltanschauungs. This is not acting-together, but rather Obama pushing his audience to act out his ideology of hope, ending his introduction of the term on the succinct imperative, “You think about it.” There are other desires Obama wants his supporters to act out: “I want your support in this race,” he proclaims somewhere in the middle of his speech, an admission resulting in further robust cheering. In fact, after commanding the audience to “think about it,” he uses the phrase “I want you to” as an imperative eight separate times, including seven times in approximately two minutes. This is textbook ethos, rooted in a rhetor’s pre-established, i.e., previously created and/or existing, character that appears strong, sanguine, and sedulous (and thus, Aristotle tells us, persuasive). But, again, while this textbook definition of ethos can help explain the (pre)construction of Obama the candidate, its power to explain the audience’s individualized and collectivized receptions of that construction is inadequate, an insufficiency that I will argue is systemic in rhetoric studies.

Another answer for why all that applause is, of course, the content of Obama’s speech, which, though it lacked a substantive programmatic dimension, unsurprising at the start of a campaign, was perhaps affecting and analeptic for a great many audience members. Perhaps people were moved, pathetically, by his words, a contention we cannot discount entirely, but that we can complicate by suggesting that, more than the speech, which was, again, a generally uninformative and typically broad-brushstroke affair, it was the speaker who was affecting. That this is true should not be entirely surprising, given what has already been mentioned about all candidacies ultimately coming down to the candidate. And given that, as a first-term United States senator, Obama has very little substantive foreign and domestic policy to harness for the purposes of ethos building, it is logical that he would harness the one asset readily available: himself. Near the end of his speech, Obama recounts another personal narrative, this one about a “thirty-nine city, five-day tour of southern Illinois ”that he took with United States senior senator Dick Durbin while on the Congressional campaign trail: 

[P]eople were especially skeptical that a black guy named Barack Obama could win in southern Illinois ... And one of the places we went to was a place called Cairo, Illinois [located in the most southerly and westerly county in the state], and for those of you who don't know, Cairo, Illinois, back in the late sixties and early seventies, was the site of some of the worst racial violence of anyplace in the nation, as bad as anything going on in Mississippi and Alabama. I mean there were cross burnings and active white citizen counsels, and black people couldn't get jobs in this town, and ultimately there was civil unrest and the National Guard was called in. And as we are going down to Cairo, he starts telling me the first time he went down there was during this period, and that he was a young lawyer, that he had been called in by the lieutenant governor to see what could be done to improve the racial climate there. So he goes down, takes the train, gets picked up at the depot, it is driven by a volunteer to where he is going to be staying. And before he gets out of the car the volunteer says to him, ‘Listen, young man, whatever you do, don’t use the telephone in your motel room.” And he says, ‘why not?’ ‘Well, the members, the switchboard operator of the motel is a member of the white citizen council and will report on everything that you say.’ So this made him a little nervous, but he goes ahead and he has a job to do, and he starts unpacking his bag…and [Durbin] is really feeling nervous.

And so am I, because he is telling me the story as we are pulling into Cairo.

And so we pulling in and we drive around the county courthouse, and he’s telling me more of these stories, and suddenly we come to a big parking lot, and there are about three hundred people gathered there, and I don't know what they are doing there, but I notice they are all up in [age] where they might have been active participants in what had been going on thirty years ago. But then as we get closer I notice actually about a third of the group is black, and about two-thirds is white, and as we get closer still, I notice they are all wearing these little blue buttons that say ‘Obama for U.S. senate.’

And we get off the van, and they start handing us barbecue, and they start taking pictures, and want autographs, and Durbin and I look at each other and we didn't say anything. We knew what the other person was thinking. If you would have asked Dick Durbin twenty-six years ago when he first went down there that thirty years later he would be coming back the son of a immigrant, father died when he was young, mother got cancer, got scholarships, got his way up, and you told him he would be coming back as a senior of the United States senator, and that he had with him a black guy, born in Hawaii with a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, named Barack Obama, and that he was the nominee, nobody would have believed it.

But it was happening.

Obama’s Senator Durbin narrative is interesting for reasons similar to his Pastor Wright narrative, most notably the structuring of the narrative: beginning with an initial disengagement of self, i.e., this story is about someone else’s experiences and thoughts, and ending with a (re)centralizing on the self as the story’s focus, i.e., and here’s how I, Barack Obama, incorporated those experiences and thoughts into my construction of myself as a viable candidate. In the former narrative, Wright’s sermon becomes Obama’s vision. And in the latter story, Durbin’s memories of civil strife become Obama’s actuality of civil peace and racial potential. Further, just as Obama situates himself in a presidential genealogy of apotheosis by speaking in front of the “a place where Abraham Lincoln has served,” he situates himself as the culmination of the civil rights movement, the progenitor and beneficiary of that strife. “[N]obody would have believed it,” he testifies, “But if was happening.” “Which reminds me of what Dr. King said two weeks after Bloody Sunday,” he continues:

After the marches had been turned back from the Independence Bridge, beaten, tear-gassed, billy-clubbed, feeling discouraged, Dr. King gathered them together in a church, and he said, ‘Remember, the arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.’ 

It bends toward justice, but here is the thing, Austin, it doesn't bend on its own; it bends because you bend it in the direction of justice. It is because each of us put our hand on that arc, and we say, ‘we want you,’ ‘we want universal healthcare for all Americans,’ ‘yes, we can.’ ‘We want education for all Americans.’ ‘We will bend it in the direction of justice.’ ‘We want an end to this war, and we want diplomacy, and alliances, and peace.’

Yes, we can.

If all of us put our hand on that arc and bend it in the direction of justice, I am absolutely confident that we can create the kind of

America that our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren deserve. Let's go, Austin, let's get busy, and let's get going.

Thank you.

Even the length of this personal narrative is indicative of Obama’s ethotic centralizing. But, skillfully, the crescendo at the end re-coalesces the desire for acting-together, the “reminds me,” becomes “we want,” “we will,” and, ultimately, “we can.” Acting-together is a key to Obama’s “audacity of hope” ideology; it is precisely the behavior he wants supporters to, at his request, act out, especially since he characterizes himself as, poetically, even if he does seem to protest too much, “an imperfect vessel.” And if, still four weeks away from the general election, the almost three hundred million dollars Obama’s candidacy has raised from a startling one hundred and fifty thousand discrete contributors is an accurate indication, then people’s immediate reactions seem satisfied and sanctioning. But what about people’s perdurable reactions? What gives the ethotic constructions of a candidate their continued potency? Perhaps it is as much about audiences finding candidates affecting because they wanted to find them affecting than it is about candidates actually being so. It’s probably both.

To articulate the main intellectual phenomenon my project, Enduring Character: The Persistence of Ethos and the Problem with Sincerity, seeks to describe, then, what gives ethos its durability; what cognitive motivations and social mechanisms allow ethos sustainability beyond the moment of its initial formulation by the rhetor and application on the audience? Or, put another way, what makes a person who came out on a rainy Friday in early 2007 to hear Obama speak, then go out and vote for Obama twelve and eighteen months later because of what s/he heard and saw? What qualities and characteristics is that audience member taking away from the rhetorical moment (or potentially a series of moments), from where do those qualities initially come, and how and where do those characteristics endure, even if they are not necessarily authentic, but only perceived as such?
___

* Obviously, Obama's February 2007 speech in Austin occurs a year before the controversy surrounding Jeremiah Wright's ideology and Obama's relationship to his, now former, pastor.

Isolation and/or Cooperation: part one - The Incarnation of Isolation

There’s nothing new in saying that all moments in time, when placed under a microscope, reveal a dense weave of contradictory fibers that somehow hold together to form a unified fabric. Telescoping away from this fabric, patterns emerge depicting the moment en toto. What is depicted is always the contest between these often obscured—because they are either too big or too small to clearly make out—contradictions of thought, act, and attitude. All of which is to ask: what contradictions persist today? And what do they say about the way we’re talking to each other? Two fat, essential threads run through American cultural and political life over the greater portion of the last decade, both extensively covered in popular and scholarly circles: one is the inclination to fracture and atomize, an instinct to withdraw into defensive positions, reacting to perceived threats. The other, ostensibly countervailing, inclination is to engage in multiple communal discourses, an instinct to aggregate and mass process information, a form of ‘proaction.’ Clearly, the former is an effect of 9/11, and the latter a product of the Internet. Any understanding of how current public debate is conducted, maintained, and understood must acknowledge and triangulate the conflictual nature of these threads, as well as the ways they, seemingly paradoxically, weave together to depict this modern moment. And, to be honest, these dual threads of reactive defensiveness and proactive discussion are hardly the unique providence of the modern moment. Though the antecedents were different, a similar paradox existed in, no doubt, Andrew Jackson’s America as it did in Lyndon Johnson’s America, et al. A similar paradox existed in, no doubt, post-Weimar Germany as it did on the cusp of the French Revolution. Historic precedent is significant, of course, but my interest lies in delineating these threads in medias res rather than ab ovo; my interest lies in talking about what we’re saying, not what we said.

Political psychologists characterize the instinct to withdrawal as a move towards intolerance and exclusion rooted in judicial, legislative, nationalistic, psychological, and religious rigidity, what they call the “worldview defense” stemming from explicit thoughts of one’s mortality. John Judis’s article in the August 2007 The New Republic succinctly summarizes the causal relationship between post-9/11 stressors and increased manifestations of worldview defense in America. I suspect, however, that there’s more than fear of death contributing to the current ambivalent feelings towards American policies at home and abroad. Though I’m no authority in these ideologies, I recognize that debates surrounding American interventionism and (often, versus) isolationism are deep and deeply troubled. George Washington warned against embroiling the young country in the “ordinary vicissitudes” of making and breaking geopolitical alliances. Adams lost his job to Jefferson because he refused to enter into a much-clamored-for war with France. But recent history has swung the pendulum away from those early non-interventionist tendencies: including, the United States involvement in both World Wars, the Cold War strategy of containment (for more on which see Isaacson and Thomas’s The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made), resulting in Truman’s invasion of Korea and Eisenhower’s (and Kennedy, and Johnson, and Nixon’s) invasion of Vietnam, Clinton’s dealings with Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999), and the current Taliban retaliation in Afghanistan and the long embargo and subsequent invasion of Iraq. But even during these eruptions of intervention, our national disposition towards interventionism has been vexed, e.g., we entered the United Nations but rejected the League of Nations; the deposing of Saddam Hussein was widely supported before it was decried. So, even before our September tragedy, American political ideologues walked a fine line between embracing and rejecting interventionist and/or isolationist strategies.

George W. Bush also publicly walked the same fine line. In the second presidential debate of the 2000 campaign, he famously proclaimed that, “I think the United States must be humble and must be proud and confident of our values, but humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.” A day later he would expand on that statement, claiming that, “If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us; if we're a humble nation, but strong, they'll welcome us. And our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and that's why we've got to be humble, and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom.” These comments are interesting for two reasons, I think: one, they draw a subtle distinction between interventionism and isolationism that highlights the vexation noted above even as it attempts to counterbalance it. It seems that, for Bush, a ‘humble’ American foreign policy models “freedom” for other countries through the restraint of power, not its exhibition (mostly defined, if history is any indication, as use of force). This position can be labeled non-interventionist in its urging of caution towards non-defensive military engagements, but it’s not strictly isolationist, given its call for open ideological exchange (that ‘exchange’ might not accurately describe the transaction is another issue). Bush had previously qualified his position on isolationism during a November 1999 interview with the BBC when he said, “there is a protectionist and isolationist sentiment in our country and I'm going to resist that sentiment madly because I believe that we can and must lead the world to peace.” For a time this “humble” desire to “lead the world to peace” by “project[ing] strength in a way that promotes peace” resonated with the American electorate, as we know.

And even after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, President Bush, in his 2006 State of the Union address, stressed that, while “the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting,” America “rejects the false comfort of isolationism.” But this State of the Union, delivered four years after 2002’s famous “axis of evil” address, revokes the distinction between isolationism and interventionism as subtly as it was drawn in 1999 and 2000:

To overcome dangers in our world, we must also take the offensive by encouraging economic progress, and fighting disease, and spreading hope in hopeless lands. Isolationism would not only tie our hands in fighting enemies, it would keep us from helping our friends in desperate need . . . Our country must also remain on the offensive against terrorism here at home. The enemy has not lost the desire or capability to attack us . . . In all these areas -- from the disruption of terror networks, to victory in Iraq, to the spread of freedom and hope in troubled regions -- we need the support of our friends and allies. To draw that support, we must always be clear in our principles and willing to act. The only alternative to American leadership is a dramatically more dangerous and anxious world. Yet we also choose to lead because it is a privilege to serve the values that gave us birth. American leaders -- from Roosevelt to Truman to Kennedy to Reagan -- rejected isolation and retreat, because they knew that America is always more secure when freedom is on the march.

Isolationism here, as Bush redefines it, is no longer leadership by example, or at least it’s no longer just about that. Instead, isolationism “ties our hands,” preventing us from taking and remaining on “the offensive.” “The offensive” smacks of classic interventionism, even if Bush constitutes it as comprising both a humanitarian and a martial aspect, including a singular moment when the two aspects intertwine, i.e., “the spread of freedom and hope in troubled regions.” “American leadership” cannot just be “projected” anymore; it must be reified. In the 2000 debate cited above, Bush stated that he was “not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, ‘This is the way it gotta be.’” “We can help,” he continues, “I mean, I want to empower people. I don't -- you know, I want to help people help themselves, not have government tell people what to do. I just don't think it's the role of the United States to walk into a country, say, ‘We do it this way; so should you.’” But in his 2006 State of the Union, the only “alternative” to the presence of American “leadership” “is a dramatically more dangerous and anxious world.” Freedom, after 9/11 “marches;” it helps people, Bush contends, though he elides that it does not seem as particularly interested anymore in helping them help themselves. By the time the “opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign” to “undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war” commences on 19 March 2003, the distinction between isolationism and interventionism has collapsed like an over-jostled soufflé. All of which may well be known to us in retrospect, but what’s important to note is that, again, for a time this less ‘humble’ desire “to disarm Iraq” also resonates with the electorate.

The second reason that Bush’s comments on isolationism, and their evolution, interest me, then, concerns the mostly seamless, widely accepted, and rarely questioned transition from freedom projected to freedom protected that occurred between 2000 and 2003. Certainly audience reactions weren’t entirely seamless and unilaterally accepted, but exceptions, like former Knight Ridder (now McClatchy) reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, are, sadly, noteworthy. (For more on these exceptions, including Landay and Strobel, see the Bill Moyer’s Journal episode “Buying the War.”) And, given the historic uneasiness with interventionist ideologies and their counterparts, and contemporary uneasiness with the 9/11 attacks (nestled snugly in the middle of that three-year period), it is perhaps understandable that critical questioning was in short supply. Pyszczynski, Solomon, and Greenberg’s In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror (2002) suggests that Bush’s post-9/11 ethos (my word) derives from “his image as a protective shield against death, armed with high-tech weaponry, patriotic rhetoric, and the resolute invocation of doing God's will to 'rid the world of evil'" (qtd. in Judis). In other words, American’s own post-9/11 ‘worldview defense’ dovetails with the sort of qualities and characteristics expressed by Karl Rove in the speech I cited in my 29 April post, e.g., “a readiness to act and a comfort in deciding,” “an ease in making decisions,” “a consistency of purpose, but a willingness to change strategy in moments of crisis,” and “an internal self-confidence.” In 2001, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan presaged Pyszczynski, Solomon, and Greenberg’s speculations, and even Rove’s cogitations, on the Bush ethos:

The charismatic figure Mr. Bush follows is the last big American president, the last who had the massive presence of a battleship, Ronald Reagan. People kept wondering last year during the election if Mr. Bush had it in him to be a Reagan. I thought maybe he did. But now as I watch him I think: Truman. Harry Truman did it all through gut and instinct and character. He was a good man who loved his country. He loved to read history and could quote Ovid, but he was no intellectual, not a man of strikingly original thought; his mind wasn’t so much creative as quick, and solid as a rock. He grew into the job, on a steep learning curve, forced by history to absorb facts and decide quickly. He didn’t know about the atom bomb until the first week of his presidency. Mr. Bush has been on a similar steep curve, forced to absorb and decide quickly, and his decisions too seem to have been issued from a mind that’s quick and solid as a rock.

Three years later (in 2004) she writes that “I think Mr. Bush is admired and liked after three years of war, terror, strife and recession because people have eyes.” “They look at him, listen to him, and watch him every day.” Noonan continues:

They can tell that George W. Bush is looking out for America. They can tell he means it. They can see his sincerity. They can tell he is doing his best. They understand his thinking because he tells them his thinking. They think he may be right. They’re not sure, but at least they understand his thinking . . . Americans do not think Mr. Bush has a persona to dazzle history, they think he is the average American man, but the average American man as they understand the term: straight shooter, hard worker, decent, America-loving, God-loving.

For Noonan, one assumes, Bush’s “resolute invocation of doing God's will to 'rid the world of evil'” is precisely what is called for in these troubled times. She applauds presidential characteristics who utilize “gut and instinct and character.” She appreciates that Bush is not an intellectual, but could, theoretically, like Truman, “quote Ovid.” And she values a president who does “his best,” so long as “he means it.” Indeed, she wants her president to be sincere, to be a “straight shooter.” Noonan wants, I’d argue, the worldview defense president; a president who projects a “protective shield” behind which civic audiences may huddle during confusing and confused times. Goebbels’s 1945 birthday speech for Hitler (cited in my 29 April post), delivered when “all forces of hate and destruction have been gathered once again,” suggests a similar desire for a particularly centralized kind of leadership. In his Anatomy of Fascism (2004), Robert Paxton lists “the emotional lava that set fascism’s foundations:” including, among others, 1) “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions,” 2) “the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external,” 3) “the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary,” 4) “the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny,” and 5) “the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason” (p. 41).

Let me be clear, Bush is not a fascist, even a closeted one. But there are undeniable ethotic parallels between what Paxton calls the “mobilizing passions” that have allowed fascism to flower, and the recently displayed worldview defensives that have allowed Bush, cribbing from Rove and Noonan, to act ‘from the gut.’ The reason the electorate resonated with those moments of time when Bush’s non-interventionism (pre-2001) shifted towards subtle interventionism (2001-2003), then shifted again towards his embracing of preemptive intervention (post-2003) is, I suspect, because his ideological migration seemed perfectly natural given the circumstances of crisis. In other words, he acted as a “natural leader,” who “alone is capable of  incarnating the group’s identity.” As Noonan points out in her column titled "Plainspoken Eloquence" after Bush’s “axis of evil” State of the Union address in 2002, “A great gut plus a reliable character is maybe the exact perfect mix for any president, but certainly for a wartime president.” In that same 2002 article, Noonan describes what she notes is a “blunt” “unveiling” of “what will perhaps be known as the Bush Doctrine;” “[T]he United States will no longer hope for the best in the world and respond only after being attacked; we will, instead, admit and act on the facts of the WMD era and actively search out our would-be killers wherever they are and whoever supports them and shut them down dead.” Paxton, I suspect, would sense some similarities between the “emotional lava” of Goebbels’s birthday speech (in some senses his farewell to the Fuhrer and the Reich) and Bush’s 2002 State of the Union. Bush:

We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side.  I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons . . . In a single instant, we realized that this will be a decisive decade in the history of liberty, that we've been called to a unique role in human events.  Rarely has the world faced a choice more clear or consequential.

“Misfortune must not make us cowardly,” Goebbels proclaimed, “but rather resistant, never giving a mocking watching world the appearance of wavering. Rather than hoisting the white flag of surrender that the enemy expects, raise the old swastika banner of a fanatic and wild resistance, renewing the oath that we swore so often in the happy and safe days of peace, thanking god again and again that he gave us a true leader for these terrible times, feeling bound in our hearts to his sorrows and trials, thus showing the enemy world that they can wound but not kill us, that they can beat us bloody but not force us down, torture us, but not demoralize us!”

I’m talking here about similarities in rhetorical presentation, not political intention. Just as those qualifications Rove outlined in his 2002 Utah remarks about what makes a president great do not necessarily represent intrinsic ethos as much as an epideictic proposition that audiences must ultimately either accept or reject, so too is the group identity to be “incarnated” up for negotiation. The trouble, clearly, is what happens when the group is disinclined to negotiate. What then? Does the leader’s ethos become authoritative by default? Can someone who possesses uncontested authority be considered a “natural” leader? Noonan wants her leader to be a “straight shooter,” because it is important, for her, that voters “can see his sincerity.” But what if she, like Rove’s audience member who called Bush “such a good man,” merely accepts a constructed version of Bush’s ethos as natural instead of recognizing an authentic version? (Perhaps she didn't presage Rove at all.) “I wrote to one of Mr. Bush’s aides the other day,” Noonan relays in her 2001 article, “a smart and gifted man, and he sent back a note saying the most moving thing that has happened to him the past two months is ‘seeing that George Bush is a great man—a truly great man.’” Perhaps in some ways Bush really is a great man; my point is not to argue with Noonan. Instead, I wonder if ‘natural’ leadership is a priori or a posteriori? That is, can leaders act natural, or does performance of ‘natural’ leadership negate the authentic natural? What, even, is connoted by that word ‘natural?’: someone who possesses essential leadership, genuine leadership, unaffected leadership, or unrestrained leadership? How do audiences figure it all out?

Part two of this thread (forthcoming) will take up the ways civic audiences recognize and exercise (or don’t) their agency in these kinds of ethotic transactions with their leaders, especially in relation to the proactive communal discourse I mentioned at the onset of this post.

"The New Paternalism"

I found myself thinking a lot about an article by Evan R. Goldstein in The Chronicle Review section of last week's Chronicle of Higher Education about "new paternalism."  In the article, Goldstein interviews economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein about their new book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which argues that because, in Goldstein's words, "In reality human beings are lazy, busy, impulsive, inert, and irrational creatures highly susceptible to predictable biases and errors," certain "correctives" are enacted by policy makers in order to "nudge" people into making better decisions.  A nudge is  "any noncoercive alteration in the context in which people make decisions" that seeks to correct for "people's cognitive limitations." Setting a default policy that forces you to opt-out of your company's 401K plan instead of opting-in is an example of nudging; if employers know that their employees tend to be lazy about starting their 401K's, then they craft a policy using that laziness to the employees's benefit, literally. Employees are free not to start a 401K, but failing to act in a timely fashion won't hurt them, and will likely help them. Thaler and Sunstein call this philosophy "libertarian paternalism," a term they contend is "not an oxymoron." "We are not for bigger government," they claim, "just for better governance."

I have not yet read their book, so I'm in no real position to critique the potential brilliance and/or sticky-wicket-ness surrounding libertarian paternalism, but I found this part of their interview, a quotation from Sunstein, interesting, and perhaps pertinent to my own project:

For too long, the United States has been trapped in a debate between the laissez-faire types who believe markets will solve all our problems and the command-and-control types who believe that if there is a market failure then you need mandate . . . The laissez-faire types are right that . . . government can blunder, so opt-outs are important. The mandate types are right that people are fallible, and they make mistakes, and sometimes people who are specialists know better and can steer people in directions that will make their lives better.

Sunstein's evocation of specialists interests me because it seems to suggest a fairly typical acceptance of, and reliance on, what scholar Douglas Walton calls "cognitive authority." So-called 'nudge' policies are crafted by people with specialized knowledge and skills in whatever fields are influenced by the policies in question: if Mary Poppins does her job just right, not only will a spoonful of sugar help the medicine go down, her charges won't even know they're being medicated. Walton's book, Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority (1997), attempts to methodically parse the authoritative logic and potency underwriting expertise, especially of the legal, legislative, and technical sorts that seem to interest Thaler and Sunstein. Walton's point, greatly reduced, is that most people are "intimidated by experts." "[W]e quite rightly feel powerless," he continues, "and feel we lack the resources necessary to deal with this kind of problem" (p. 22). Walton's advice, again greatly reduced, is for nonexperts to learn to ask of experts better questions. Thaler and Sunstein, I assume, would agree with Walton that citizens's best bet is to evaluate experts's arguments using "judgment and reasoning," but unlike Walton, they don't seem particularly concerned with a dialogic gap between experts and citizens. Poppins does not have to announce to her charges that the sugar masks the medicine.

To be fair, I'm not knocking Thaler and Sunstein's libertarian paternalism, despite my use of a nanny metaphor; from what I know about their philosophy, I find their argument compelling, especially the notion "that understanding human irrationality can improve how public and private institutions shape policy by increasing the likelihood that people will make decisions that are in their own self-interest . . . while protecting freedom of choice." Their state is not a nanny state: but it is a state where pragmatic conceptions of human behavior allow policies to be tweaked so people's interests are best served. That the sort of persistent adherence to self-interests purported by pure economic theory isn't really part of most people's actual applied mental calculus is well established, including by behavioral economists like Thaler in his The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life (1994). Similar 'myths of rationality' are documented in the political realm by, among others, Samuel Popkin's The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns (1994), Arthur Lupia, et al's Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality (2000), and Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (2007). The fact that UWA members overwhelmingly voted for unionbuster Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 (because, I presume, he made them feel patriotic) provides an anecdotal example. So, while I suspect that libertarian paternalism cannot keep someone from voting themselves out of a job, it does seem logical that it can unobtrusively help her not forego retirement saving because of negligence.

Whether or not Walton would approve of Thaler and Sunstein's emphasis on experts who "know better" to "steer people" towards making their "lives better" is debatable, but I suspect he'd caution us to proceed slowly at any rate. As economist Bryan Caplan points out in a sidebar to the Chronicle Review article, "politicians suffer from the same problems voters suffer from." For Walton, the 'danger' of expertise is what he calls the "inaccessibility thesis" (p. 110), that is, the difficulty nonexperts have in tracking down the premises on which experts's judgments are rooted. Coupling Caplan and Walton's concerns with the validity of expertise (at least of the unquestioning acceptance of expertise's validity) offers legitimate anxiety over paternalism (libertarian or otherwise) trusting in intellectual oligarchies.

What we're talking about, of course, is ethos (again). That economists are the best able to craft economic policy, doctors medical policy, lawyers legal policy, urban planners traffic patterns, etc., etc. is, to my mind, completely logical and difficult to contest. American life revolves around expertise, anecdotally evidenced by the professionalizing-focus of most departments in our universities, the range of judgment-based reality shows on our televisions, and the ubiquitous coven of on-air pundits circling overhead during elections. We trust people who have the authority to speak on a topic. Or, more accurately, we trust people whom we perceive to have such an authority to speak. What if our perception is accurate, but our trust violated? Thaler and Sunstein acknowledge that "incompetent or corrupt government nudgers can do a great deal of harm by directing people towards bad choices." Goldstein writes, though, that "they emphasize that in many areas--from personal finance to health--people are ill informed, inexperienced, and therefore ill equipped to make the choices that are in their own self-interest." The government, they conclude, "has the resources to hire experts who can help demystify an increasingly complex world." For them, the risk of experts manipulating us via their ethos outweighs our nonexpert understanding of complex social issues. Besides, given expertise's current cachet in our culture, it's likely that in the near future everyone will be an expert on something for fifteen minutes. Less flippantly, a potential avenue this project may take would explore the ways people's understanding of expertise's form and function has sharpened recently, making them savvier readers of expertise, which Walton advocates, even if they lack 'cognitive authority' in any particular area touching policy creation. Similarly, and similarly speculative, increased reliance on, and recognition of, expertise may allow for a more refined collective understanding of the expert's intentions, thereby avoiding ethotic malfeasance: current work on collective understanding and action is being done, including Gladwell's Tipping Point (2002), James Surowiecki 's The Wisdom of Crowds (2005), and Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams's Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2008); a historical perspective on the rise of ethos as expertise can be found in Kenneth Cmiel's Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (1991). Whether or not citizens really are issues ignorant and susceptible to ethotic manipulation is less interesting to me than the discussion about how we figure out whether or not that ignorance and susceptibility is real.

What if our perception of expertise is just plain inaccurate? How could we know? What would be our response, and would it be appropriate? Certainly, Walton's concern would be justified. And his solution, generally speaking, would be worth considering. Walton aligns himself with a strand of rhetoric/communication theory called pragma-dialectics that focuses on arguments as performative and constructive, meaning that the best way to study rhetorical conflict is to understand that argumentative acts are always purposeful and responsive to prior acts; there's always a reason for the act, and it always builds on an earlier act. Walton's book is largely a stiff taxonomy, pragmatic in spirit, for how people can better evaluate the authority derived from expertise by asking better questions of experts, dialectic in spirit. In prepping juries to deal with forensic scientist testimony, Walton's process proves useful. But it's difficult to generalize Walton's taxonomy to broader discussions about the ways people and experts interact. Part of this difficulty is illustrated by Walton's argument's inability to anticipate and engage Thaler and Sunstein's libertarian paternalism, with its "principle of transparency" in implementing "noncoercive alterations" to policies that provide "better governance" by tricking people into doing what's good for themselves. I'm hesitant to pit Thaler and Sunstein against Walton, however, without first reading Nudge. For now I think it will suffice to raise some potential questions about that matchup: if Walton's pragma-dialectical approach is valid (I think so), if audiences ought to engage in dialog with ethos-heavy rhetors (in this case experts), how does that process work when the ethos lives in a paternalistic policy?  Policies are, of course, created entities, but they are rarely the creation of a single person. They are the children of many individual parents working together (and not). Perhaps we can say that they are the products of the government, but what does that mean to say that the institution has an ethos, especially when we're concerned with the ways audiences negotiate ethos with rhetors. Natch: how can you be in dialog with an institution?

I should probably read the book first. It's on order...

No, I'm not saying Bush is Hitler...

...but there are some interesting observations to be made about how political operatives influence public perception of the leaders for whom they operate by comparing a November 2002 speech by Karl Rove at the University of Utah, later transcripted online, entitled "What Makes a President Great" with Joseph Goebbels's April 1945 speech, widely circulated in German newspapers, commemorating Hitler's fifty-sixth birthday. No, I'm not saying that Rove is Goebbels.

Rove's speech outlines several "changeless characteristics" of great presidents: 1) "clarity of vision . . . clarity about the goal, if not always clarity about the method," 2) "consistency of purpose, but a willingness to change strategy in moments of crisis," 3) "for good or ill, the legacies that have been left to them by the previous presidents," 4) "an internal self-confidence," 5) "a healthy respect for public opinion, but not to be dictated by opinion polls," 6) be a "successful coalition builder," 7) "surround himself with a strong team," and, finally, "there must be a readiness to act and a comfort in deciding." Goebbels is more succinct: "Times like those we experience today," he says, "demand more of a leader than insight, wisdom, and drive. . . . Here stands a man, sure of himself, having a clear and firm will, against the unnatural coalition of enemy statesmen who are only the lackeys and tools of this world conspiracy."

I am not an expert in German history, but I suspect there wasn't much joy in the Fatherland in April 1945, despite the Fuhrer's birthday; Goebbels himself begins his speech by admitting that "never before did things stand on such a knife's edge," acknowledging the looming "death blow to the Reich." But instead of understandable despondency, Goebbels's tone is, unsurprisingly, defiant. For him, Hitler embodies this defiance. "He is the core of resistance to the collapse of the world," Goebbels proclaims, continuing, "He is Germany's bravest heart and our people's most passionate will." Indeed, "If the nation still breaths, if it still has the chance of victory, if there is still an escape from the deadly dangers it faces," Goebbels crescendos, "it is thanks to him," concluding, "He is steadfastness itself." More accurately, then, defiance is embodied in Hitler by Goebbels, a rhetorical act with a clearly transitive goal. If Hitler is "manly" and "sure of himself," steeled, "despite terrible pain and suffering," against "our hate-filled enemies," Goebbels contends, how can the German citizenry respond any differently? He is, after all, "Fuhrer of a great and brave people." And if it is "manly and German...to depend wholly on oneself in this struggle," then "it is just as manly and German for a people to follow such a Fuhrer, unconditionally and loyally, without excuse or reservation." It is necessary, Goebbels concludes "to trust in the good star that is above him and us all." Goebbels's encomium is not simply a descriptive acclamation of Hitler's character; it directs the audience's perceptions and reactions via that description of tenacity. It models for them the behaviors they should exhibit. Moreover, it fuses the leader with his people, diffusing the leader's characteristics into the larger political community: "We feel him in us and around us."

Thirteen months after the 9/11 attacks, and four months before the start of "Operation Iraqi Freedom," Rove's speech sits on its own knife edge, with America sandwiched between its own "deadly dangers." In retrospect of course, it is easy to draw straight lines between the eight characteristics Rove defines as essential to presidential greatness and the well-documented rationales employed by the Bush administration to engage, promote, and defend the March 2003 invasion. For Rove, most of these eight characteristics come down to leader as ultimate "decider," the term Bush was humorously derided for employing in April 2006. But the term appears in the middle of Rove's 2002 speech. * "One of the great easy deciders was Theodore Roosevelt," he explains, following with a story of Roosevelt's decision to build the West Wing "where the garden conservatories were," a decision lamented by Roosevelt's wife: "In 1857, Buchanan began building these ornate glass conservatories. Over the years, they had grown and grown and grown. It was a great social highlight of Washington to be able to go, particularly in wintertime, to see the orange trees with the First Lady. Mrs. Roosevelt did not want the conservatories   to be removed. She lobbied the architect to find another location for the West Wing. He reported this to Roosevelt, who in characteristic style said, 'Smash the glass houses.'"

Snarkier aspects of me want to suggest that "smash the glass houses" sounds an awful lot like current administrative attitudes towards foreign policy, but that isn't the point. What I am saying is that Rove, like Goebbels, is not merely describing an inevitable kind of leadership, or even a particular sui generis leader, he is constructing a public sphere where such descriptions are accepted as inevitable and sui generis, and, thus, logical and necessary. This acceptance occurs even though the exactitude of what we accept is evidently questionable because of the snugness with which those requisite characteristics --what we should call the leader's ethos-- fit the situations in which they were described. In other words, we accept it even though we sense there is a rhetorical manipulation afoot.

The manipulation occurs when the ethos described by the operative is manifested by the leader as if it were intrinsic to the leader and not a construction of the operative, et al. This is exactly what happened when Bush, four years after this speech by Rove, dubbed himself "the decider." Despite the ribbing Bush took for his lexical misuse, most Americans seemed to understand what it meant, in part because of Rove's preexisting and persistent cadence, elsewhere as in this speech, that 'decider-ness' is an inherent Bush characteristic. This formulation of the reciprocal Bush-Rove (leader-operative) relationship, not shockingly, calls into question the viability of adjectives like 'misuse' and 'his,' just as Hitler's suicide undermines Goebbels's claim that the Fuhrer is "the core of Resistance." Both instances suggest that the operative-constructed ethos of the leader qua leader is not necessarily synonymous with the character of the leader qua individual, though they may wish us to believe it so.

With this reciprocity in mind, the most fascinating part of Rove's 2002 speech isn't even in the body proper, but during the subsequent Q&A session when an audience member tosses Rove a big, fat slider of a question:

Audience Member: Mr. Rove, it is a real privilege to have you here. One of George W. Bush’s greatest   assets seems to be that his opponents always underestimate him. Perhaps you could maybe shed some light on why people seem to do that, and as one who truly knows the president, maybe you could just   shed a little light on what makes the president such a great leader and such a good man.

Rove's response is worth reading in its entirety; search intext for "I can't explain why they underestimate him, but they do" that begins Rove's response. What follows is approximately eight hundred cogent words, suggesting that, though this response was extemporaneously delivered, its content was not spontaneously generated in Utah, November 2002.

The way Rove embodies Bush as simultaneously Everyman and Ubermensch is also well-documented, though perhaps never as densely as in this response. "I think [they underestimate him] because he is from Midland, Texas," Rove begins, "and his idea of a vacation spot is Crawford, Texas, rather than Hyannisport." Bush as the Everyman. But, he immediately continues, "He is one of the best-read people I have ever met. He was a Yale undergraduate, a history major. He has a great sense of history and its forces. He is the first president to be an MBA, a Harvard MBA" Bush as the Ubermensch. Rove announces that "I think a great deal of it is his personal characteristics." The antecedent to that "it" is left unclear, but we can bridge the gap easily enough: Rove closes the circuit between the general, historical "changeless characteristics" that make presidents great and the "personal characteristics" of this particular president: "He is a person who is centered . . . I think he is also someone who is driven by a vision." Here another instance of reciprocity is generated. "Clarity of vision," a gregarious and inchoate concept, can easily apply to any declaration Bush makes, Rove knows, and such self-conscious and expansive labeling reinforces, reflexively, the notion that the label indicates an essential characteristic of Bush. Even in the face of massive public disapproval --indeed especially in the face of it-- Bush's declarations, stemming from his clarity of vision, cannot be criticized as tone deaf and stubborn because, to restate Rove's changeless characteristics, Bush's persistent adherence to his "vision" exhibits an "internal self-confidence." Or, as Rove explains more fully in answer to the student's question about Bush as "such a great leader and such a good man:"

He knows what he believes. He knows he is not always right. He has an ease in making decisions. He has a vision of where he wants to go, a comfort that he is going to do the best he can do, and if people don't like if, he is going back to Crawford, Texas and mosey around his sixteen hundred acres, get a new pair of boots, watch baseball games, and read some good books.

This statement concludes Rove's response to the student, and it is here that we see Rove emphatically conflating the conceptual "great president" with the current president, a man who likes both to "mosey" and "read some good books." A great president maintains "a healthy respect for public opinion, but not to be dictated by opinion polls," while Bush "is going to do the best he can do;" a great president must be maintain "a readiness to act and a comfort in deciding," while Bush "has an ease in making decisions." Etc. "[H]e is successful because he is a person who is entirely comfortable in his own skin," Rove summarizes. One suddenly suspects that blithely and assertively demanding the smashing of glass houses is not beyond the purview of a leader so deeply comfortable with his own ethos.

If Rove and Goebbels's speeches are more than descriptive declamations celebratory in focus --which we might call an epideictic mode-- what, then, are their functions? The answer may be that perhaps they are a sort of trojan horse epideictic from whence the rudiments of political bulwarks are raised, defensive in 1945 Germany, preemptively offensive in America, late 2002. Both speak of "rare times" and "rare individuals." Goebbels's claim that "Times such as these are rare in history," is easily paralleled by Rove's hypothesis that most presidents are not "called upon to deal with the greatness of the times." It is obvious that both operatives want audiences to believe that their man, their leader is such a rare individual in such a rare time, and so the purpose of their speeches, beyond approbation, is to prepare the earth for the building of those bulwarks. That the audience asks to be told how great a leader and good a man Bush is suggests how easily that preparation is accomplished: if the digging is done by the audience, the shovel is forged by the operative.

In their New Rhetoric (page 52), Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca suggest that "the speaker engaged in epidictic discourse is very close to being an educator." Since the function of the epideictic mode is conventionally celebratory, they explain, "what he is going to say does not arouse controversy" because the speaker is "simply promoting values that are shared in the community." In this sense, Rove and Goebbels are educators, if by that term we understand the act of education as the establishment of a reiterable framework by which the world is made intellible for audiences. Less kindly, it's an education where the educator both defines the word and quizzes its meaning. The problem with their explanation, though, is that their assumption that "no immediate practical interest is ever involved" fails to acknowledge the dual-purpose epideictic mode highlighted here by Rove and Goebbels. I'd argue that both operative's speech had definite "practical interests" beyond panegyric: for Goebbels it was a rallying cry of 'once more to the breach,' while for Rove it was the introduction of Bush's character, and more significantly, the casting of that character as authentically Bush's, so both can act as pre-established (seemingly intrinsic) keys waiting for audiences to unlock the justifications behind the administration's posture towards the 'global war on terror' and post-9/11 foreign policy. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca are absolutely right, then, that speakers's "own authority" over audiences helps them "increase the intensity of adherence to values held in common by the audience and the speaker." Certainly Goebbels and Rove understood this fact.

A more extensive analysis, however, could take into account the proportion of authority between speakers and audiences in negotiating which values are held, and the extent to which they are held "in common."
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* In Rove and Bush's defense, there are a handful of instances in the OED of the use of "decider," starting in the mid-sixteenth century, with none newer than the late nineteenth century, most dealing with either biblical scripture as ultimate arbiter, or the championship of a series of horseraces.

[Thanks to Trish for the lead on Goebbels.]

I stepped out for a moment.

Sorry. Back.

Super Bowl Kerfuffle

Even though I'm rooting for the hometown Colts in today's Super Bowl, everyone should take a few minutes to enjoy this, which, I'm sure, is the first time it's been referenced in the last two weeks. Were we ever so innocent?  In the twenty years between Chicago's trips to the Super Bowl, the landscape of American football, professional and collegiate, and attitudes towards sports in America has changed considerably in the wake of intense commodification, relentless commercialism, celebrity idolatry, and performance enhancement. Maybe the "Shuffle" is to blame. Is it the moment that started it all?

Personally, I love football, warts and all. It is a game of genuine beauty: not the way, say, the Grand Canyon is beautiful, but the way a mathematic equation is said to be beautiful through its circumscription of infinite complexity by relatively few rules. A rubric for seeing order in seeming chaos. Plus, there's something extraordinary about the somatic and strategic control required of players and coaches, especially when they are challenged to marshal those skills in concert against an antithetic opponent.

But while the game itself might be, as Dennis Hopper once exclaimed, "a ballet of bulldozers," that doesn't mean football as a socio-cultural institution is faultless. Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during halftime of the 2004 Super Bowl drove the nation to distraction. But it shouldn't be the single nanosecond of nipple we 'saw' that disconcerts us. What about the half dozen beer and 'erectile dysfunction' commercials--one featuring a farting horse that burns a woman's hair, another a dog biting a man's scrotum--that are crammed down our collective craws? What about the fact that, despite the NFL's aggressive family-friendly marketing, most Americans can barely afford to take their family to a football game, let alone to the Super Bowl, the industry's crown jewel? What about the underhand manner in which sports media entities like ESPN create stories in order to report them as 'news?' (I'm looking at you, T.O.) And what about the spectacle of generally oversized, generally undereducated, and generally African-American men hitting each other with the force of small trucks? For a more substantial read on the subject, check out William Rhoden's "Forty Million Dollar Slaves." Or, read Daniel Gross's shorter NYT piece, "The NFL's Blue-Collar Workers" (21 January), which does a good job summarizing some of these concerns, though George Will's critique of the game may be even more succinct: "It combines two of the worst things about American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings."

Like I said, though, I still enjoy watching the game at all levels. I'll watch any two teams play football. Perhaps my ability to separate good from bad is because I'm able to watch with a critical eye informed by being a former offensive lineman and a current rhetorician. I'm able to, cribbing from my wife, "hate the player, not the game."

In future posts I'd like to examine my positions on football further, because, for all its troubles, I think the game also represents much about what is good in our country. And it is this, perhaps paradoxic, intricacy between football's positive and negative sides that makes it a significant topic. Football as fact and metaphor goes far to encapsulate and explain the poltical and cultural life of America, both individually and communally. Today just seemed an appropriate day to introduce the subject.

Tom Vilsack

Today my wife and I had the opportunity to sit in on a taping of "Texas Monthly Talks," an extended interview show produced by the local PBS affiliate, where the guest was former Iowa governor, and current Democratic presidential candidate Tom Vilsack. This post is not an endorsement of Vilsack; since some people still have their holiday lights up from '06, it's probably too early in the '08 race to start placing bets. But he was pragmatic and articulate, and I think a handful of his comments are worth relaying. (Of course, if you're in Texas, you can always watch him for yourself, check local listings and all that.)

If you don't know who Tom Vilsack is, you're not alone. This short article from "The Des Moines Register" (1 February) cites a poll where 81 percent of respondents "hadn't heard enough" about him. But during the interview, Vilsack claimed he isn't concerned about being overshadowed, in either notoriety or finances, by presumptive Democratic primary favorites Clinton and Obama, despite their, apparently non-meteoric, first-name-only cachet. Vilsack called himself "electable," offering what he considers a successful track record of accountability and assistance as governor in a Republican-controlled state. * I'll let you peruse his record for yourself, most of it focused on ethanol and healthcare access. He asserted his capability to win-over marginally red states like Ohio, especially given the potential challenges facing Clinton and Obama when they dive into 'middle America' to ask for votes.

The above article, however, suggests that he may be overstating things a bit. Perhaps those poll numbers are simply a function of a still-pullulating POTUS08 election slate, but they may also be harbingers of the fact that, without more money **, Vilsack's days may be numbered. Plus, as the hometown hero playing on his hometurf, it should be safe to assume that he will get a substantial boost in cashflow and media coverage coming out of next year's Iowa caucus, except for the fact that electorate-rich states like California (55), Florida (27), Illinois (21), and even Texas (34), are contemplating--trust me, it's a done deal--plans to leapfrog Iowa (7) and New Hampshire (4) on the primary calendar. If that happens, it will be a de facto nationwide primary election day, where all the money's spent, and all the dark horses taken behind the barn, before mid-February. We can discuss in the comments whether or not a single primary day is a good thing, though after the interview I asked him why it benefits Iowans in particular, and Americans in general, to have 'small' states host the country's first primaries. I found his answer responsible, though ultimately I'm unsure if I'm persauded: because of the geographic and population size of large states, he postulated, candidates cannot genuinely and intimately interface with the people in order to deliver their campaign messages. They can't "get into church basements." What you see candidates do in Iowa, what you hear them say to Iowans is, Vilsack suggested, an accurate portrait of who they are and where they stand.

Certainly Vilsack has some good things to say. The bulk of his interview, and the subsequent Q&A, was focused, unsurprisingly, on Iraq. Again, I'll let you judge for yourself whether or not his call for immediate withdrawal of American soldiers, forcing Iraqi self-governance to sink or swim, is appropriate, but his response to a question about his lack of geopolitical experience, and Beltway experience in general, is worth repeating: experience is not essential. What's required, he asserted is "judgment." As I understand him, being president is a job that no one is ever really experienced enough to take on, but that there are definite characteristics that help someone do the job more effectively, intelligently, and compassionately. Making circumspect decisions based on rational analysis of multiple sources of input--wink and nudge--is crucial, he said. Unsurprisingly, but perhaps rightly, Vilsack does not think that Washington is making good decisions for its constituency these days (by which, one assumes, he means before November '06): post-9/11 legislation is rooted in "fear," resulting in policies which ask people to turn "inward" for self-realized, self-maintained security and survival, instead of turning outward toward collective solutions. He may not go the distance, but that one comment articulated, for me at least, an understanding of the indispensable need to hybridize pathos and pragmatism in policymaking.
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* It was Republican controlled while he was governor, but flipped Democratic last November.

** If the article asks for a login and password, use Bug Me Not to bypass the process. Works for most nonpay sites, esp. online newspapers.

 

Gold-Plated Indifference

I failed to blog the last three days due to a debilitating case of cedar fever, Austin's tortuously special brand of hay fever where, according to my allergist, "pollen counts of cedar pollen in Central Texas are the highest know anywhere in the world, for any plant." But I have re-upped my prescription meds, with some low-dose steroids throw in for good measure, so I think I can get through this.

At least going to a medical specialist was an easy option for me: I get good coverage with a reasonable copay through my employer. Obviously this isn't true for millions of Americans, a fact that should chagrin and moritfy us all. Since Bush's proposed healthcare fix has come up in the comments of some of my recent SOTU posts, I thought I'd introduce my thoughts on the matter in an official post. For my money, the most au courant pundit writing about healthcare in America is Paul Krugman: 

"A Healthy New Year" (1 January)

 "First, Do Less Harm" (5 January)

"Golden State Gamble" (12 January)

"Gold-Plated Indifference" (22 January)

My own views tend to mirror Krugman's fairly closely, so, like him, I believe a single-payer system is the most efficient, effective method for providing sustainable healthcare to the majority of Americans. I appreciate, but do not share, the categorical imperative many conservatives feel towards decreasing taxes, but Bush's "standard tax deduction for health insurance" seems to fly in the face of the conservative call for smaller government, which, as I understand it, underwrites that imperative. With a single-payer system there is one moment of government 'intrusion,' namely the annual collection of each individual's share of the total cost.  Bush's plan requires continual and multiple levels of government oversight of taxpayers, healthcare providers, and medical insurers, not to mention his proposal to grant federal funds "to help the states that are coming up with innovative ways to cover the uninsured." Often, state's plans are as complicated as Bush's alleged tax break. For more on this, see Krugman's "Golden State Gamble." To their credit, however, state plans are generally more authentic attempts to help Americans than anything the Bush administration has concocted.

Because Bush's "standard tax deduction for health insurance" is also, to put it bluntly, illogical for the simple fact that people who have inadequate or immaterial healthcare are also unlikely to pay taxes. How can they, then, benefit from tax deductions? Plus, no amount of tax break increases access to information about the intentionally convoluted system of personal insurance. No amount of tax break will help you get accepted for coverage despite your pre-existing condition. And certainly no amount of tax break will decrease the substantive cost of unchecked insurance premiums. I think this is a textbook case of not getting blood from a turnip. A single-payer system, conversely, would indemnify those Americas unable to cover themselves (as well as the rest of us), and it does so in a fair and simple manner, using procedures that are wholly consistent with the market. Just because the demand-side has been collectivized doesn't mean that the supply-side has to be taken away from private providers. Think Canada's system, not the United Kingdom's.

Don't take my word for it: check out Krugman's "Gold-Plated Indifference," where he argues that, "Going without health insurance isn't like deciding to rent an apartment instead of buying a house. It's a terrifying experience, which most people endure only if they have no alternative. The uninsured don't need an 'incentive' to buy insurance; they need something that makes getting insurance possible." Krugman pointedly accuses Bush, "someone with no sense of what it's like to be uninsured," of misunderstanding and misrepresenting the causes and effects of America's healthcare crisis:

No economic analysis I'm aware of says that when Peter chooses a good health plan, he raises Paul's premiums. And look at the condescension. Will all those who think they have "gold plated" health coverage please raise their hands? According to press reports, the actual plan is to penalize workers with relatively generous insurance coverage. Just to be clear, we're not talking about the wealthy; we're talking about ordinary workers who have managed to negotiate better-than-average health plans. What's driving all this is the theory, popular in conservative circles but utterly at odds with the evidence, that the big problem with U.S. health care is that people have too much insurance - that there would be large cost savings if people were forced to pay more of their medical expenses out of pocket.

Krugman concludes that, "Mr. Bush. . .is still peddling the fantasy that the free market, with a little help from tax cuts, solves all problems." A statement with which I agree, and whose source, I believe, is rooted in what Krugman labels as Bush's "condescension." One of the principle delinquencies I see in conservative ideology is the scapegoating of the poor: the assumption that living in a democracy means the interminable and readily available actuality of options mixed with accusations that, because they make bad choices, it is their own fault for being poor. I'm not sure if these twin notions are grounded in an unshakeable, though not entirely wrongheaded, confidence in 'the American Dream' (you know, work hard, get ahead), but to my eye and ear they are largely unwarranted and spurious notions, the purpose of which is to make it easier to ignore America's deeprooted class crisis, and to accept our persistent failure to solve it.

Because, rhetorically speaking, scapegoating, as Kenneth Burke put it, is "the use of a sacrificial receptacle for the ritual unburdening of one's sins." In my formulation, and I think Krugman would agree, Bush, as an avatar of conservative thought, wants to intimate that it is poor people's own fault, because of their bad decision making, for not having proper healthcare coverage instead of placing the blame where it belongs: bloated insurance premiums, non-negotiated pharmaceutical formularies, reliance on emergency care, and a paucity of preventative care, all feeding off of governmental ignorance and neglect. And if it's their fault, we don't have to feel guilty and/or responsible for their conditions. "The stuff about providing "incentives" to buy insurance, the sneering description of good coverage as 'gold plated,'" Krugman coolly concludes, "is right-wing think-tank jargon. In the past Mr. Bush's speechwriters might have found less offensive language; now, they're not even trying to hide his fundamental indifference to the plight of less-fortunate Americans."

As with so many issues facing us, globally and locally, this one requires a paradigm shift, a change in perception towards what is the actual problem, and what is required to actually solve it. The first step is to recognize that poverty is a social disease, not a personal one. The reality is that, for all its metaphoric power, 'the American Dream' is often damaged, and sometimes flatout erroneous. But as a country, we have to stop unloading our dissatisfaction about that fact onto the most disenfranchised segments of our society. Reaganite 'welfare queens' no longer exist (and it was Clinton's 'welfare reform' that killed them). Mexican immigrants are not stealing our jobs and milking our social programs. And poor people are not bringing us down. But we are failing to bring them up. Shame.

'Strong' Word(s)

Last time we'll discuss Bush's SOTU, promise, but I want to follow up on the point I made on 22 January about Bush not really comprehending that the authority of a speaker--his ethos--is derived from an audience's validation, their acceptance, of his credibility. My suspicion was that Bush's speech to the nation would miss the centrality of audience in effective rhetorical situations.*

What we actually heard was a better attempt, I'd say, at cultivating a genuine ethos than in the past five SOTUs, but it is still, I'll argue, an imperfect attempt. First, we have to recognize a subtle but signifcant fact about this particular rhetorical situation: the POTUS's speech is not to the American people, it is about the American people. The strict audience for the SOTU is the joint Congress; the "rite of custom" to which Bush refers is that enumerated in Article II, Section 3 of The Constitution, whereby the POTUS "shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient." Thus, we get passages like this, where we get the sense that they're talking about us while we're still in the room:

Congress has changed, but not our responsibilities.  Each of us is guided by our own convictions -- and to these we must stay faithful.  Yet we're all held to the same standards, and called to serve the same good purposes:  To extend this nation's prosperity; to spend the people's money wisely; to solve problems, not leave them to future generations; to guard America against all evil; and to keep faith with those we have sent forth to defend us.  [Underline emphasis added.] 

But since 1) legislators are the directly elected representatives of the people, and 2) the speech is broadcast, all at once, across every media outlet imaginable, the larger audience can be said to be every American. And, indeed, Bush recognizes the presence of this larger audience, and his speech is quick to include them, that is, us. Check out the transformation of the word 'us' in the above paragraph: when Bush claims that "each of us is guided by our own convictions" he is, of course referring to the ideological split between the members of the legislative and executive branches, and the partisan disagreements within the Congress. But that final "us" of the paragraph telescopes beyond just The Hill. Now "us" is all Americans, and soldiers are fighting to defend all of us.

But I'd argue that fast and dirty pronoun conflation isn't really an effective ethical strategy, not, at least, in the strictest rhetorical senses of the word. Moreover, he quickly microscopes the "us" in the follow paragraph back to just the country's leadership:

We're not the first to come here with a government divided and uncertainty in the air.  Like many before us, we can work through our differences, and achieve big things for the American people.  Our citizens don't much care which side of the aisle we sit on -- as long as we're willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done. Our job is to make life better for our fellow Americans, and to help them to build a future of hope and opportunity -- and this is the business before us tonight.

This paragraph marks, as I read it, Bush's first stab at ethos. Here we see him trying to shoehorn all three of Aristotle's ethical qualities--good sense, good moral character, and goodwill towards the audience--into a single movement. I suspect you can suss out the way he is trying to establish goodwill with the largely hostile Democratic Congress, and by extension the seven out of ten Americans who no longer trust him, by reaching across the aisle in order to enact "a future of hope and opportunity." And you can see him trying to (re)build his moral character by conceding the frustrations "our citizens" feel towards partisanism. And, finally, you can see him trying to showcase his good sense when he blueprints "our [their] job" and "the business before us tonight."

Then it's basically forty-five minutes of you've heard it all before, right?

I mean, of course you have. Like I said on 22 January, "What are the chances that he can postulate workable strategies during the eleventh hour of his presidency?" His credibility is shot. Even if he was masterful at constructing ethos, even if he could get us--the people and their representatives--to validate his authority, there's just no 'there' there anymore. If you want proof, listen to his previous five speeches where he told you right upfront, presenting it as if it were--I'm tempted to say scripture, but let's call it--fact, that America is "strong." (The Daily Show did a nice bit on this yesterday.) Last night,  however, that line is his closer:

In such courage and compassion, ladies and gentlemen, we see the spirit and character of America -- and these qualities are not in short supply.  This is a decent and honorable country -- and resilient, too. We've been through a lot together.  We've met challenges and faced dangers, and we know that more lie ahead.  Yet we can go forward with confidence -- because the State of our Union is strong, our cause in the world is right,  and tonight that cause goes on.  God bless. [Emphasis added].

His rhetorical strategy here has to stem from an awareness of those low, low popularity numbers, and the exigencies of facing a hostile majority. Because he's used up his trust equity, his ethos, with the American people, he can no longer frame the speech in terms of strong. This time he must build a case for America's strength. He must work, rhetorically speaking, towards a strong union, not starting from one. He must provide evidence, confirmation, and good sense. I'll leave it to you to decide just how strong we actually are, and whether or not what he outlined last night makes us stronger.

But I will say this: it strikes me as a bad sign when, in order to gain ethos, you have to quote your enemy. "Our enemies are quite explicit about their intentions," he begins:

They want to overthrow moderate governments, and establish safe havens from which to plan and carry out new attacks on our country.  By killing and terrorizing Americans, they want to force our country to retreat from the world and abandon the cause of liberty.  They would then be free to impose their will and spread their totalitarian ideology.  Listen to this warning from the late terrorist Zarqawi: 'We will sacrifice our blood and bodies to put an end to your dreams, and what is coming is even worse.'  Osama bin Laden declared: 'Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us.'

There is an odd sort of authority at play in the above lines. But it isn't Bush performing his own authority so much as harnessing that of Zarqawi and bin Laden. There is also, no doubt, a healthy dose of fearmongering being employed: their authority isn't rooted in Aristotelian goodwill, but rather the deadly actualization of the opposite. (True, even though Zaraqawi's been dead for months, and we have no idea about bin Laden.) Republican strategist, some might say diabolist, Frank Luntz agrees with me.  Luntz is the guy who invented the phrase "death tax" to replace estate tax and "healthy forests" to replace clearcutting, so he understands the power of words.

In that spirit, I found Bush's penultimate SOTU "healthy."

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* Think of each instance of communication as a triangle, where the speaker (writer), the text (oral, verbal, visual), and the audience (real and imagined) compose the three points: each connecting to each. Without the presence of all three, the triangle is broken, i.e., communication is likely to breakdown.

Statistics of the Union

Tomorrow is Bush's penultimate State of the Union address (SOTU), and, as this ABC News/Washington Post poll (22 January, pdf) exhibits, he "faces the nation this week more unpopular than any president on the eve of a State of the Union address since Richard Nixon in 1974." Ouch. I won't wade through all the statistics here, but read the first six pages of the report for yourself.  None of America's overwhelming disapproval of Bush and his policies is shocking, but it provides an opportunity to talk about what I consider an elemental flaw in the rhetorical strategies of Bush and his fellow neocons: they misunderstand, and thus misuse, ethos. Stick with me. Understanding ethos, that dimension of persausion describing how audiences perceive speakers (writers as well), is critical because it provides audiences with tools for judging the quality of a speech's content by judging the quality of the speaker.

Modern rhetoric mainly defines ethos in terms of authority, giving paramount influence to whether or not a person is licensed to speak on a particular issue. License is generally defined as 'source credibility,' which can be gained through either knowledge or experience. This is why we trust four out of five dentists when they recommend a particular gum that cleans plaque off our teeth: they have the specific, requisite knowledge to speak on the hygienic abilities of gum. And this is why we trust convicts to 'scare' us 'straight:' they have the requisite experiences to tell us how it really is in prison. Authority-ethos is the reason we see so many expert witnesses on Law & Order. The thing to notice about authority, however, is that it is conferred on speakers by audiences. It isn't inherent in the speaker. Trusting a doctor when she gives medical advice is logical, but her authority, rhetorically speaking, ultimately comes from her patients trusting in her knowledge and experience.

Classical rhetoric is similar, though it defines credibility in different ways. Aristotle considered ethos a central component of effective persuasion, and he outlined three qualities "which inspire confidence in the orator's own character--the three, namely, that induce us to believe a thing apart from any proof if it:" good sense, good moral character, and goodwill towards the audience. That is, audiences can tell a lot about the quality of a speech's content by whether or not the speaker seems practical, virtuous, and genuinely concerned. Later critiques of Aristotle pointed out that, though it's possible for these characteristics to be inherent in the speech and speaker, generally speaking, it is the audience who validates these qualities.

Ok, so my point is that tomorrow, as you watch the SOTU, listen for statements by Bush that don't quite get how ethos works. Bush's relentless 'trust me' line is not only wearing thin, it misses the mark by a country mile: trust cannot be demanded. It must be given by the American people, and as the above poll indicates, that isn't happening.  Bush is likely to address the 'surge' at length, and he's likely to have plenty to say about immigration, healthcare, education, and "energy security," but he has already squandered whatever authority people once granted his administration through the (mis)construction and (mis)implementation of incompetent and incomplete policies. What are the chances that he can postulate workable strategies during the eleventh hour of his presidency? And I guarantee that what he outlines won't be rooted in Aristotelian ethos. His previous SOTUs have introduced the lofty and now-obviously impractical democracy doctrine (2004 and 2005), and the bombastic but decidedly un-goodwill-ed "axis of evil" (2002).

I'll let you decide whether or not he's virtuous.

So, even though he says he isn't bothered by his low popularity, as he did on 60 Minutes (14 January), I think he should be. Because it's that popularity that imbues his position with potency. The fact that he doesn't recognize that fact is indicative of his misunderstanding of the office.

the power of negative thinking

Even though it's been out for a few months, I just ran across this book by Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit, (B 829 D54 2006 for those Library of Congress junkies reading this). Dienstag, a political science professor at UCLA, argues that pessimism isn't simply an attitude of defeatism, but a philosophically and politically viable, and healthy, weltanschauung. Optimism, held in almost spiritual esteem in America, is "both dangerous and morally suspect," he claimed in an interview from November 2006. But philosophical pessimists, he suggested, recognize that "There's a big difference between the pursuit of happiness and an expectation of it," and, moreover, that unhappiness is an inescapble component of life, a realization that actually assists a person's effort to live contentedly. Optimists expect happiness, and are often disappointed when reality fails to meet those expectations. "Having an expectation of happiness," he stated in the same interview, "just compunds ordinary suffering by making it seem like injustice."  It's hardly surprising then, "that a nation of optimists can produce a politics of resentment."

But it produces more than just resentment in politics, and this is why I think Dienstag's six-month-old comments have continued relevancy, esp. in light of the upcoming 'surge,' and the fact that almost fifty million Americans are still uninsured; the optimistic determinism expressed by the Bush administration asks more from people than it can ever possibly repay, trafficking in promises of a future that is, supposedly inevitably, happier and safer. Think about Bush's thumbs-up on the deck of the USS Lincoln in front of that huge 'Mission Accomplished' banner a week after the initial invasion of Iraq. Think about Bush telling a single mother working three jobs that her position is 'uniquely American.' Think about what we're bound to hear during next week's State of the Union address: Stay the course. (And) Happy days will be here again. Certainly plenty of politicians trade in assurances and positive thinking, but what we've seen the past six years is, as Dienstag states, "the rhetoric of sacrifice [being] abused to justify suffering and centralize power."

Or, as Camus explained, "the future authorizes every kind of humbug." Perhaps this particular Camus quotation is unfamiliar to Bush, though Dienstag and his interviewer both pick up on it, but Bush has famously read "The Stranger," some of which must have made an impression on him. (My flippant side wants to quip that all he got out of Camus was the 'killing of the Arab.') Recall the speech he gave last August at the national convention of the American Legion: "The images that come back from the front lines are striking, and sometimes unsettling," he informed us, "When you see innocent civilians ripped apart by suicide bombs, or families buried inside their homes, the world can seem engulfed in purposeless violence."

But also recall that this is the same speech where he introduced the struggle against terrorism (the neologism is 'Islamofascist') as "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century," a phrase he repeats three times. The ideologies he opposes are standard fare by this point: freedom versus tyrrany, democracy versus fascism, terror versus...let's call it optimism. So, yeah, there's 'purposeless violence,' but then again, he continues, "The truth is there is violence, but those who cause it have a clear purpose." His timbre here, as most everywhere since, is one of breezy but intransigent affirmation. These are truths that will allow us to navigate precarious moderntimes, and the subtext is that Bush and his hawkish inner circle see these truths clearly, and are clearly lead by them. Our job is simply to believe in them, sacrificing any critical and moral incredulity we might experience. In this single speech Bush uses the word "sacrifice" half a dozen times.

The problem with truth defined ideologically, as Bush often does, is that ideology is highly contextual, meaning that the relevance and applicability of each ideology's content depends on the producer of that content, where it was produced, and why. That is, ideology is fluid, not static. And it's inherent truthfulness is rarely self-evident. So, it is generally a way of ordering the world not by what actually is, but by what we believe ought to be, and often what we think we need to do to get there. I'm not knowledgeable enough to speak on what terrorists think the world ought to be, but from what I can tell from seeing and hearing Bush over the past six years, his ideology seems painfully optimistic. He believes we can change the future. For the better. Americans and Iraqis are paying the price for his happy sophistry. Dienstag, the pessimist, thinks that "We just have to give up our fantasies about controlling the future. We should let the future surprise us." And if it disappoints us, we won't be so shocked. Or screwed.

What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy

If you read the 'About Me' portion of this blog, you'll see that my biggest societal pet peeve is waste--the pococurantism, fecklessness, and overconsumption running rampant in America today. I recognize that what constitutes governmental 'waste' is open for a discussion which cuts to the heart of what role government should play, but I think most of us can agree that, in terms of lives lost and money spent, the invasion of Iraq has been a colossal waste. Check out what we could be doing with the $200 billion a year we're spending on this war, not to mention the life toll we could be avoiding. For more, read David Leonhardt's piece in the NYT about 'What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy' (17 January).

But perhaps the hemorrhaging of money and blood is about to be stemmed. According to the AP, the Pentagon has decided to stop asking Congress for emergency supplemental payments to fund the invasion. Moreover, there is an increasing number of Congressional Republicans who are suddenly vocally against the invasion. An impending bipartisan resolution is likely to pass the Senate in the coming days--watch for it either right before or right after the State of the Union address--denouncing Bush's 21,500 troop 'surge.' Though this resolution will be nonbinding, meaning that there is no real power of enforcement reflected in its language, it is hardly toothless. The newly minted Democratic Congress is taking lots of flak from talking heads and the blogosphere because many people see this resolution, particularly its 'nonbindingness,' as empty symbolism. But they're missing the point. A bipartisan and public censure of Bush's new Iraq plan will do much to empower current, and embolden potential, opponents of the war. If that happens, perhaps it will be easier in the near future for Congress to pass more unsparing, and more binding, resolutions to end this war.

The one thing I think we can take to the bank: those 21,500 troops are going to Iraq. Unfortunately, Bush still has the authority, the backing, and the funding to get it done, despite what the majority of the Congress, and the American people, think. These additional troops will put the in-country number at approximately 150,000, which is still fewer than the initial invasion strength. How can we ever hope to stabilize the situation with troop strengths just large enough to play cat and mouse with the insurgency? People like General Eric Shinseki, Army Chief of Staff, were stressing--before March 2003--the need for at least 300,000 troops to successfully invade and stabilize Iraq. He was replaced. And people like Lawrence Lindsey, a Bush economic advisor, were stressing that the invasion would cost upwards of $200 billion. He was replaced.

As I see it, there are two viable options:  either pull out coalition troops altogether immediately, and let whatever happens (civil war, economic depression, genocide) happen (meaing America must live with the collective guilt that we inflamed it), or provide a genuine 'surge' of troops in Iraq, say, double what it is now, to stabilize the country through shear weight of presence. Neither option is palatable. But at this point, there's no way to get the toothpaste back inside the tube.

Surge Against the Surge

As the Thomas Edsall op-ed in the NYT, 'Happy Hour' (18 January) suggests, the newly minted Democratic Congress's 'First 100 Hours' contrivance may actually be working. Domestically, I think that Pelosi and her Dems are making all the right moves right out of the gate: minimum wage increase, stem cell research funding increase, tuition loan decrease, oil company tax break decrease, and a tightening of campaign ethics.

But the thousand-pound elephant in the room (pun intended) is still the invasion of Iraq, which, it's common knowledge, most Americans are solidly against. In fact, almost sixty percent of Americans oppose Bush's proposed 21,500 troop 'surge.' Even Robert Novak is scared what the political fallout of this new offensive will mean for Bush and the GOP. (Hoping for the other guy to fumble isn't a winning strategy.)

So, while I think it's right and proper that the Congress should begin immediately redressing these domestic concerns that Bush, Hastert, et al have allowed to slip over the tenure of their residency on The Hill, it's obvious that the people's tolerance towards the Congress not acting on Iraq sooner than later is slim to none. As the above LA Times article (18 January) indicates, "The public clearly wants Congress to address the issue in some fashion: Forty-five percent of those polled said Iraq should be Capitol Hill's first priority, more than double the next-closest issue (dealing with healthcare, which drew 20%)."

What that action looks like is up for debate I'd say.

Automatic for the People

In honor of R.E.M.'s induction into the Rock Hall of Fame, here are a couple clips from their first ever television appearance, on the David Letterman Show in October 1983: Radio Free Europe and So. Central Rain. Notice the painfully introverted Michael Stipe; this is the Stipe of my youth, who mumbled lyrics purposefully (and perhaps a bit abstrusely), leaving their interpretation up to the listener. NB also the fact that 'So. Central Rain' is so new that it does not yet have a name.

For me R.E.M. is essential to my personal growth, as I'm sure it is for many, many others. Listening to those early R.E.M. albums, esp., 'Murmur,' 'Fables of the Reconstruction,' and 'Life's Rich Pageant,' made me eager to experience the weird, wide world beyond smalltown Indiana. But it also helped me realize, perhaps paradoxically, and certainly more significantly, that place is important. Being from somewhere is important, a point of pride.

I didn't actually make it out to Athens, Georgia until just a couple years ago, but I got a pretty good sense of the place--gothic, lugubrious, dilatory, prideful and passionate--from those early R.E.M. albums. The Midwest isn't any of those things, so the discovery was all the more fascinating for me as a boy.

Here is a picture I took of soul food sage Weaver D.'s sign, which inspired what most people consider to be R.E.M.'s greatest album. (It's great, but I would probably vote for 'Fables' or 'Pageant.' And I've always said that 'Monster' was underappreciated.)