. . .the milkcrate. . .

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.

discursive vs. discoursive

In a recent essay I wrote, I used the word 'discoursive' to suggest a communicative relationship between rhetorical entities who were serious about equitable, sustainable, and transparent discussion, or discourse. A reader of my essay disapproved of my usage, saying that discoursive is an antiquated and unnecessary replacement of the more common 'discursive,' the word generally used in contexts similar to the ones where I'm using discoursive. 

According to the OED, it is true that discoursive's usage pattern ranges between late sixteenth and early eighteenth century, with nothing noted after roughly 1750. Moreover, discursive is noted as an etymological and lexical synonym to discoursive, both denotating the use of ratiocinative logic. I'm willing to accept and act on my reader's disapproval, then, but I cannot shake this nagging feeling that discursive fails to connotate as accurately as I want the conversational aspects between rhetor and audience. By conversational I mean that audience involvement in public illocutionary acts is more intimate and influential than generally recognized. Audiences affect rhetors, often in convoluted ways. Conversational suggests, I think, that sort of perdurable and coiled discourse. Discursive suggests something much more deductive, much more linear than I want it to. Discursiveness, to my ear, fits conventional conceptions of rhetors offering, one way, a rhetorical performance to audiences, who, in most public situations, have little opportunity to react. But discoursiveness calls attention to the two-way.

I'm unsure, then, precisely what I would need to do to make discoursive salient, short of a historical contextualizing that will likely prove tangential to the project proper.

"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."
-------
* 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.

and the winner is... (music edition, part 2)

25     Thermals - The Body, The Blood, and the Machine
24     Danielson - Ships
23     M. Ward - Post-War
22     Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint -The River in Reverse
21     Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out of this Country

It's no secret that most 'Christian rock' somehow manages to do a disservice to both Christianity and rockmusic, but Danielson is an exception. The latest outing from this relatively prolific collective is idiosyncratic and catchy, a combination that generally wins me over. Check out esp. the ridiculously fun "Did I Step on Your Trumpet." M. Ward's newest album, like his last one, sets a highwater mark for 'indie folk,' esp. the relentlessly singable "Chinese Translation," which may have the best video of the year. Costello and Toussaint have produced the most professional, if not the most profound, testament/indictment of Katrina and its aftermath. It's serious stuff, but it can swing. Check the reworking of Toussaint's staple "Who's Gonna Help A Brother." The voice of Camera Obscura's Traceyanne Campbell puts me in mind of sixties girlgroups, think Lesley Gore and Skeeter Davis, but her songs are much more irritable.

20     Grizzly Bear -Yellow House
19     Black Angels - Passover
18     Centro-Matic - Fort Recovery
17     Sunset Rubdown - Shut Up I Am Dreaming
16     Beyonce - B'Day

I've already mentioned in this space my affection for the greasy prog sound of Austin's Black Angels. But it's another Austin (well, Denton) band that is number one in my heart: after the disbanding of Guided By Voices, a.k.a The Greatest Rock Band Ever, Centro-Matic moved up as my favorite rock act. And while "Fort Recovery" isn't as strong top to bottom as their previous "Love You Just the Same," it is a closesecond, a terrific, ambling rock and roll record. Will Johnson, whether playing with C-M, South San Gabriel, the Undertow Orchestra, or solo, has the lyrical dexterity, and productivity, of any musician from Dylan to Pollard. Sunset Rubdown is the side band of Wolf Parade member Spencer Krug. One reviewer described the album as "reminiscent of David Bowie/Brian Eno’s post-apocalypse fixation, circa Station to Station." What's not to like about that?

As for Beyonce...I never thought I'd be adding her album on any 'best of' list, but she has managed to make, for the most part, a funky soul album in the classic Atlantic Records mold. I don't feel out of line thinking of "B'Day" as an update on Aretha Franklin's mighty mighty "Young, Gifted, and Black" album from 1971 (if you don't have it, get it). The contrived and graceless insertion of inamorato Jay-Z is a hiccup easily forgotten, esp. once Beyonce, at times cocksure, e.g., "Suga Mama," at times ragged, e.g. "Ring the Alarm" does her thing. Then the album hums. But don't take my word for it; here's the best album review of last year.

15     Cat Power - The Greatest
14     Cadence Weapon - Breaking Kayfabe
13      Tapes n Tapes - The Loon
12     Destroyer - Destroyer's Rubies
11     Shearwater - Palo Santo

Now that Liz Phair has gone decidedly ProTools (a decision I don't begrudge her), Cat Power, nee Chan Marshall, is the indie rock empress, even though she's the new face of Chanel (a decision I don't begrudge her). Anyway, her album isn't the greatest, but it is plenty great, esp. the smoky "Lived in Bars." Plus, backed by journey sessionmen from Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Marshall's voice--so husky, pulls a bobsled--is given lots of room to play. Canada's Cadence Weapon is probably the tightest hiphop artist of the year, an Aesop Rock for the great white north. For that party mixtape, check out leadoff track "Oliver Square." Full of his signature labyrinthine lyrics and self-referential ritornelles, Dan Bejar's (also of New Pornographers fame) newest Destroyer album is maybe his best effort to date: the kind of album that can only be listened to en toto. Another Pitchfork Festival highpoint for me. Shearwater, another Austin band (most of the members are also in Okkervil River), has put out a record that, while fuzzy and sparse, is deceptively complex, and may, at times, even be pretty. 

10    Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
9     Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins - Rabbit Fur Coat
8      TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain
7     Band of Horses - Everything All the Time
6     Tom Waits - Orphans

Case's album cracks the top ten on the herculean strength of one song: "Star Witness" may be the year's best single. (Who are we kidding? That honor probably has to go to Gnarls Barkley's ubiquitous earworm "Crazy.") But, as good as it is (painfully good), there's more to commend this album than just the one track. Jenny Lewis's debut solo is worth every scrap of press it got. A smart effort full of appropriate amounts loathing, both against the self and others. The track "Rise Up with Fists!" should make both Chrissy Hyde and Loretta Lynn proud. (And the Hee Haw parody is nicely done.) Band of Horses, like fellow newcomers Tapes n Tapes, above, is powerpop-rock that does what it should do, rock, a rarer commodity these days than one might assume. Tapes n Tapes's "Insistor" and Band of Horses's "The Funeral" are on opposing ends of the metronome, but, overall, the Horse's album gets the nod because it is a denser record, more exploratory and emotional, than its counterparts.

And then there's Tom. God bless Tom Waits. I find it amazing that, across this three-disc, fifty-plus song, quasi-retrospective, there are very, very few, if any, outright dogs, and lots and lots of outright gems. Then again, I find that totally unamazing. Listening to songs like "Long Way Home" solidifies Waits's brilliance, because, after all, these are the tracks he didn't include on his other albums.

5     Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped
4     Howe Gelb  - 'Sno Angel Like You
3     Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs - Show Your Bones
2     Yo La Tengo - I am Not Afraid of You, and I Will Beat Your Ass
1     Hold Steady - The Boys and Girls in America

"Rather Ripped" is the best Sonic Youth album in fifteen years, running from scorching rockers like "Reena" and "Incinerate," to more freaky fare like "Do You Believe in Rapture?" Like Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo prove that bands that have it, always have it. And like SY, YLT have gone back to the rawkous well for "Beat Your Ass." And if the pugnacious title didn't give it away, the ten-minute opener will. There's still plenty of electronic dissonance, but the guitars are loud and proud, meandering through what seems like a funhouse of rock history. There's the sockhop fingersnapper, and there's the solipsistic reverb jam. For the first time ever, Yo La Tengo may have made an album you want to listen to as you drive. Howe Gelb's latest effort contains all the vaguely arrogant, vaguely disconsolate lyricism of his other work, but this time he's paired with a full gospel choir, and the  spartan guitar and sensuous rejoicing work contrapuntally, a complimentary relationship that is as pleasing as it is surprising.

There are these moments when Karen O of the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs does this sort of unearthly yelp on the track "Gold Lion" that almost singlehandedly make "Show Your Bones" one of the three best albums of the year. But the rest of the album is likewise fantastic. Less guttural than their debut, the added control strengthens without detracting from the rawness. Tracks like "Phenomena" and, esp., "Cheated Hearts" are prime examples. As I mentioned in part one of this list, 2006 proved a great year for female-focused rock and roll, perhaps a sign that Sleater-Kinney can rest in peace.

But the best album of 2006, for my money, is The Hold Steady's tip of the hat, wink of the eye, to American youth culture, both contemporary and nostalgic. Why? Because the album rocks. That's why. The Hold Steady are making it acceptable to dig bar bands again. Or, as culture critique Chuck Klosterman puts it, The Hold Steady are for people who "used to like AC/DC but now just read a lot." The album's received some criticism for its limited subject matter, but, come on, Springsteen's been telling the same stories for thirty years. We dig The Boss's stories not because they are epic, but because they aren't. And because he's so good at telling them. There's more than a little Springsteen, narratively speaking, in The Hold Steady. There's a pervasive sense of 'lucky to be here today, but wouldn't change yesterday if I could.' (The album's title comes for Kerouac, who knew a little something about destructive habits.) Check out their eminently singable "Chips Ahoy."

That's quite enough. Time to start on 2007...

and the winner is... (music edition, part 1)

Yeah, I fell off the wagon. Posting every day proved harder than it sounded. But I'm back onboard and ready to give it another go. Stick with me: that turbulence is typical during takeoffs.

So I didn't get to scoop the Grammy Awards, but I still want to list my selection for the top fifty albums of 2006. If they can do it in February, so can I. Besides, now you can find many of these for a good used price. Unlike my lifelong occular boycott of the Oscars, I have watched snippets of the Grammys, but would never try to stomach the entire event, which I imagine would feel like eating all your Halloween stash in one sitting while drinking a Boone's Farm. Mostly I tune in when either reunions, e.g., The Police this year, or 'supergroup jam sessions,' e.g., the tribute to Joe Strummer in 2003, take place. Because, frankly, I'm not the key demographic for the Grammys.  Also, I don't really give two figs who wins the award for "Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media" or "Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental." And my Oscar objections apply to the Grammys as well: abject wealth and bad comic timing just doesn't interest me. Anyway, I think I can intellectualize why all these albums are deserving, but it's something we can do in the comments; I'll limit my justifications here.

50    Spank Rock - YoYoYoYoYo
49    Fiery Furnaces - Bitter Tea
48    Steve Wynn - ...Tick...Tick...Tick
47    Midlake  - The Trials of Van Occupanther
46    Built to Spill - You in Reverse

I saw Spank Rock at Pitchfork Music Festival last summer, and their album makes the cut on the strength of their live performance, esp. since it translates well between album and venue. Lots of bleeps and blorps, but also some pretty solid vocal agility, think Frogger meets Too Short. The track "Rick Rubin" is a good mixtape addition. Former Dream Syndicate and Gutterball frontman, and member of the paisley underground, Steve Wynn still makes smart and loud rock music. Plus, I love watching his drummer, Linda Pitmon, play; she abuses the kick pedal. Built to Spill's latest is a return to the rawer, turn it up and yank it off, knobwise, sound I liked so much on their 2000 live album, though top to bottom this isn't as strong an effort as their last couple of outings. 

45    Bonnie "Prince" Billy - The Letting Go
44    Mr. Lif - Mo'Mega
43    Kaz Kyzah - Confessions of a Gofessional 
42    Decemberists, The - The Crane Wife
41    Drams, The - Jubilee Road

Like Built to Spill, both Will Oldham, in his Bonnie "Prince" Billy persona, and The Decemberists put forth albums that, while certainly worth hearing, aren't their strongest efforts. But Billy's "Cursed Sleep" is as sweetly gothic as anything he's ever penned, and I find the backing vocals slithery and spinetingling. Kaz Kyzah's mixtape, once available for free download, is creamy-smooth Bay Area hip hop, especially the track "Cocaine." If you can find it, get it. I include The Drams's debut because I still dig Brent Best, formerly of sadly defunct Slobberbone. Best has always had good twang sensibilities, and it's nice to hear him balance them with some keyboards and other pop flourishes. He's never been the best songwriter, but the full effect is fun, so I'm willing to let it slide.

40    Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit
39    Mogwai - Mr. Beast
38    Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury
37    Coup, The - Pick a Bigger Weapon
36    Detholz! - Cast Out Devils

Belle & Sebastian finally made a happy record. Good for them. Clipse's album, unlike Kyzah, is gruff, often discordant, and visceral. One of my darkhorse picks for last year is Detholz! (Death Holes) latest album, only available online for purchase. This earnest group of ex-Wheaton College students (they were kicked out) sound the way I imagine Devo might if they tried their hand at emo, which works, somehow, for the most part.

35    Lil Wayne & DJ Drama - Dedication Vol. 2 
34    Girl Talk - Night Ripper 
33    Buddha Machine - FM3
32    Mission of Burma - The Obliterati
31    Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Ballad of the Broken Seas

Girl Talk's album, the Finnegan's Wake of mashups, is best listened to in a group where everyone is clamoring to be the first to identify the dozens and dozens of samples. It's Trivial Pursuit for the ears. I find it sad and disconcerting that a band like Mission of Burma has to come out of retirement to teach bands how to play loud music that isn't superficial. I mean, this is the band who, after releasing a single full-length album twenty years ago (and one helluva EP), has released two albums over the last three years. Their guitarist suffers from tinnitus for heaven's sake. think 'angel and the badman' when you listen to Isobel Campbell, who used to be the twee-est member of Belle & Sebastian, and Mark Lanegan's, ex-Screaming Trees, duet album. It isn't consistently terrific, but when it clicks, as it does on their cover of Jack Elliott's "Ramblin' Man," it clicks.

I've been talking it up for a year now, and I still think the Buddha Machine is a must-have postmodern toy. It looks like a cheap plastic transistor radio, but it contains nine distinct tracks by ambient duo FM3 that can be played perpetually (until the battery dies) through its single, tiny, tinny speaker. The ability to endlessly listen to a looped composition captures the spirit of ambient music that often goes missing on tracks with definitive starts and stops. Buy one, put it on your desk or nightstand.

30    Beach House - Beach House
29    Long Blondes, The - Someone to Drive You Home
28    Ghostface Killah - Fishscale
27    Soul Jazz Records Presents - Tropicalia: A Brazilian Revolution in Sound
26     Alejandro Escovedo -The Boxing Mirror

Here are the adjectives used by critics to describe Beach House's eponymous album: haunting, soothing, beautiful, Polynesian. RIYL: Mazzy Star. Yeah, it's soothing, romantic dinner at home music, and the track "Tokyo Witch" is another good mixtape bet. The Long Blondes may be my favorite new band from 2006, and another instance of what a great year 06 was for female rockers (more on that later). The album sounds conventional, but lyrically it is a refreshing and rare glimpse into the companionable and supportive homosocial world of women without men. The tropicalia album is one of two inclusions of pre-06 material, but it is a fabulous re-collection of a sound--fusing folk, bossa nova and rock n roll--that deserves a reawakening, most notably the reunion of Os Mutantes. Austin icon Alejandro Escovedo's latest is his first release since being sidled with heavy debt and diagnosed with hepatitis C, and, understandably, his most personal album to date. One critic referred to it as "Alejandro Agonistes." Leadoff track "Arizona" is a slow moaning song that belies the often rowdy album that follows.

The second half tomorrow...

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.

video of the week

I've noticed a trend amongst independent music acts to rely on animation in their videos. This is no doubt because animation is cheaper than live actors, especially since the best friends of most musicians are, I assume, graphic artists who will do the job using their own copy of Macromedia Flash Professional in exchange for a spot on the guestlist. And why not? It's unlikely that any of these videos will get airplay outside of youtube and the bands's websites. Sadly, however, most of these videos tend toward the highly unmemorable and relatively uncreative, usually lots of geometric shapes made to seem 'cutesy' or 'angstful.' Sometimes a bunny does something scary or pensive.

But there are some cartoon videos that work. Like Spoon's "Everything Hits at Once," which is classy, Peter Bjorn & John's "Young Folks," which is soothingly hypnotizing, and Madvillain's "All Caps," which is just cool.

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.
---
* 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 misu