Michael Calvin McGee’s landmark essay, “’The Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” laid the groundwork for understanding idiographic—and idiomatic—language as socially and politically charged, let alone ideologically inscribed. Since Obama’s inauguration in 2008, along with talk soon thereafter of America as a post-racial society, one wonders of the actual verity of putting race behind us when it is at the fore of so many of our (ethical) discussions. That Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters are both on trial for ethics violations certainly does not present a singular example of corruption in politics. It is laughable that anyone—especially in a…“post-racial” society—could equate blackness with corruption, whiteness with purity. Post, however, does mean beyond. The question remains what such talk of “posts” will do to the ideographic nature of our conversations about race in the twenty-first century and beyond, as well as what “playing the race” card today actually indicates amongst different people. We might consider as a counter-question here what further discourse might have been around the Gulf oil spill had the BP chief executive officer been…“corrupt.”
This clip from The Daily Show touches on some interesting considerations.
Photo Credits: www.mediate.com
There was a time when Mother Nature was worshipped. There was a time when those supernatural and otherworldly forces that influenced our human ways of life were celebrated, venerated. In Greek culture, the earth was essentially deified as Gaia, or the Mother Titan, and considered to be as alive and even sentient as human beings. It has been some time, however, since we as a species have viewed Mother Nature as anything more than what Kevin de Luca has called a “storehouse of resources” for the advancement—and, alongside technology, the “perfection”—of humankind
There was also, in Greek culture, a god of the sun, Helios. Today, the annual summer solstice ignites celebration of the sun, from Stonehenge in Salisbury, England to the site of the grand Sphinx at Giza in Egypt to the Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu in Peru and beyond. Today, many participated in such celebrations. The irony remains that, while many persist to worship the sun, many likewise profane it in the wake of increasing global warming. A further irony continues to rest in the wake of the BP oil spill, whereby Oceanus, the Greek world-ocean god, is daily being desecrated, devastated and defiled.
The tragic fact of the matter is that the oil spill is far too large, far too overwhelming and thus far too much a moving target to contain amidst whirling ocean currents and changing tides. As such, it is also far too great for many of us to even fathom, and this despite the multiple updates everyday about the millions of gallons gushing into Gulf waters. And yet the summer solstice and 62nd day of the oil spill is a unique day on which to pause for reflection. I say this, not because previous days are inadequate for doing so, but because the summer solstice is so named because it occurs on the day on which the sun “stands still.” The Latin words sol (sun) and sistere (stand still) comprise the word “solstice,” indicating a time at which the sun pauses at the uppermost mark of its arc before continuing its declination.
So while the twice-a-year solstices are predictable and identifiable, the present oil spill and its potential solution are not. Yet, amidst the tragedy, the comedy that attempts to frame the spill continues to provide essential moments of pause, or “ways to get a little catharsis out of the maddening affair” as is written in this Huffington Post article. This video is but one of the myriad correctives that re-frame comically the disaster.
How we frame our view of the oil spill is certainly important. Indeed, as Kenneth Burke notes, a tragic frame of approaching this catastrophe would envisage it as an unfortunate sacrifice made in the pursuit of human perfection, a hurdle to overcome on the path to progress. A comic frame, however, enables us to make it fathomable and even tolerable until it can be changed. It recognizes while censuring human error, but always implicates humans in such events and their correction. The comic frame finds a way to laugh and live on; the tragic frame cannot stop crying and so joins Louisiana in the only path it sees left: prayer.
So it is that we should continue to put the pressure on BP to plug the leak and clean up the mess they have made. We should also keep Obama on the chopping block so long as this disaster continues. To be sure, we can look at the following political cartoon and laugh. But to look at this image through a comic frame in order to better understand why a disaster such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was allowed to happen, we may wish to consider our own, individual habits and actions—we may wish, in the interest of understanding the risks we are willing to take in order to preserve our ways of life, to move the target.
Poor mortals who good fortune do desire,
Receive the bounties of the earth or deracinate before they grow?
World knows neither good nor evil, yet knows it dire
When for their own delight poor mortals have no limit to how far they’ll go.
The first line of this (my) riddle is borrowed from François Rabelais’ La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel (The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel)—which is the epitomic exemplar of the carnivalesque, as laid out by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World.
Dating back centuries, and certainly to the time of Rabelais as well as the English Royal Courts (15th/16th centuries), the jester has played an important role in what Bakhtin calls “popular-festive” occasions. On such occasions (and on order of the monarch), the jester was given license to play the fool: to mock, satirize, jibe and deride the politics and political figures of the time. Far from being idle amusement however, the jester’s performances were often laced with subtle critiques of those in power. Moreover, they were anything but merely playful, but rather loaded with high seriousness despite their low presentation. As Bakhtin notes, such a “comic performance” is “gay and free play, but it is also full of deep meaning. Its hero and author is time itself, which uncrowns, covers with ridicule, kills the old world (the authority and truth), and at the same time gives birth to the new. In this game, there is a laughing chorus. The protagonist is the representative of a world which is aging, yet pregnant and generating. He is beaten and mocked, but the blows are gay, melodious, and festive.”
“Jonas Brothers are here, they're out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don't get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming. You think I'm joking? I’m serious.”
What was killed in Obama’s speech was the power of the carnivalesque (which is unfortunated because much of it was actually really funny); what was reborn was the power of the United States government, and it is certainly reason to give us pause as to that which we find funny and why. After all, the comic “blows” should be “broadened, symbolic, ambivalent.” They should “at once kill and regenerate,” not by putting bookends on a narrow spectrum of the norm but by “put[ting] an end to the old life and [a] start [to] the new.”
Out of curiosity, the other day I googled "Glenn Beck fallacies of argument." Few, I am sure, would be surprised by the pages and pages and pages and pages...I retrieved, all of which contained exact matches to the above phrasing along with some quite funny commentaries and analyses. So what?
Well, in a now canonical essay, “Practicing the Arts of Rhetoric: Tradition and Invention,” Thomas Farrell wrote:
Rhetoric is held in the lowest regard when it is identified solely with the product domain: sham enthymemes, slippery slogans, fele-good sound-bites. It is not until we think of the two-sided argument, the running controversy, the ritual that becomes crisis: in other words, not until we admit the liminal elements of struggle, difference and thus reflective judgment that rhetoric itself is redeemed.
After viewing Lewis Black’s lambast of Glenn Beck on The Daily Show a couple weeks back (May 12), Farrell’s sentiments began to percolate a bit and I was moved to consider Beck’s rhetorical style, his respect for rhetorical history, his “inventional” (yes, I use this sarcastically and satirically) methods. It is not news to consider that, as Black indicates, much of our media culture (from news programs themselves to their parodical counterparts) is permeated with exaggerated and overstated accounts of daily happenings. Glenn Beck, too, admits to being a tad hyperbolic, but we can surely discern this without his admission. Consider his frequent equation of political self-interest and democratic patriotism; his likening of gay marriage to bestiality, his invocations of an illusory, near-utopian Founding Period defined by political harmony that was ostensibly bastardized by contemporary politics; his comparison of ACORN to slave-owners; his claim of Obama’s hatred of white people; his condemnation of Justice Sotomayer as a racist; his constant joke about killing both internal and external enemies (from Michael Moore and Nancy Pelosi to muslims); and, of course, his liberal usage of Nazi colloquialisms (or what Black calls his “Nazi tourettes”) and paraphernalia on his show. So what?
Without even illustrating Beck’s lines of thought or his syllogistic reasoning, one can pick out much of the fallaciousness, even the purposively deceptive nature, of his rhetoric. Beck himself has jibed about the pull of his inner demons and his trajectory toward “moral collapse.” Indeed, he seems to thrive upon misleading tactics in order to at once absolve himself of his own misgivings and to drive home the absurdity of contemporary politics that, he claims, calls itself out…and, to some extent, I would have to agree—provisionally.
Yes, Beck himself, but the media more broadly, have increasingly tended more and more toward a sort of rhetorical reductionism. That is, much of our accessible political discourse orients not toward understanding the complexities but rather to simplifying politics to “sham enthymemes, slippery slogans….” The result is a narrow and too often bifurcated depiction of political choice and ideological allegiance, which necessarily leads to arguments of right and wrong (or in Beck’s case, left), good and evil, true and false…really, one may insert his or her binary here. It also leads me to be wary of such rhetorics moving from controversy (sometimes, just for its own sake) to crisis.
The problem I see has much to do with Barry Brummett’s caution about certain trends in both researching and exercising a postmodern rhetoric—namely, that reduction (or what he calls “the simplification of phenomena and the context in which they are observed”) is necessarily the attempt to mechanize, and hence control, an individual’s or group’s experience of only certain parts of a much larger whole. Thus, Beck’s program (as much as Jon Stewart’s, Stephen Colbert’s, Fox News’, CNN’s, MSNBC’s,….) appears as a well crafted rhetoric of reductionism that too often attempts to simplify and narrow the frames within which we make sense of our social and political worlds. So while I agree with Jon Stewart when he quips that Beck “says what people who aren’t thinking are thinking,” I have trouble believing that any diametric opposition is the simple solution to the problem. This is especially the case if we consider that people tend to tune in to only what they agree with and switch off (or more bluntly, silence) those voices that present a different point of view.
No doubt, Black’s lambast is hilarious, and necessary. But we must be careful not to let even humor collapse into a disavowal of the seriousness of even play. Furthermore, I think we could all deal with a questioning of our social and political faiths much more than just time to time—and this, not to live utterly foundationless and thus in a perpetual state of doubt, but rather to remind ourselves of Kenneth Burke’s astute observation: that people reason perfectly well within their own frame of reference; the key is to widen the frame.
For those who do not recognize, the parenthetical statement accompanying the title of this post references a line in Roald Dahl’s short story, “Papa and Mama,” which appears in his book, Boy: Tales of Childhood.
Now to the crux of the post….
Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.
—John Muir
Perhaps it is my sometimes-cynical outlook that goads a gloomy sense of humor, but when I saw this photo I thought two things: (1) these children are swimming in oil and (2) my gosh, how much of the Louisiana coastline has been affected by the leak from the sunken oil rig (a question that has been answer in appalling ways in the last week) and who did not inform these unwitting children that there had been a spill?
I was, of course, relieved to find that the children were not swimming in oil, but no less disconcerted to learn that they were bathing in toxic water—the one keeping his mouth tightly shut so as not to inhale it as it bubbles about him, the other looking on as the stifling sun shines upon his sullied body. For them, dirty water is normal, even mundane. For us, a polluted coast is as aberrant as it is blameworthy. Both, however, are justifiable in giving us reason to pause. The following two political cartoons give us a comic frame through which to do this.
Indeed, the sad truth is that polluted bodies of water are not altogether uncommon in many parts of the world, but particularly here in the Hindon River in Ghaziabad, India, which—as a report by the Janhit Foundation, entitled “Hindon River: Gasping for Breath,” shows—is as much a catchment for the Uttar Pradesh region’s water supply as it is a reservoir of toxins from the refuse of various mills and chemical industries (not to mention the runoff from agricultural pesticides). And the ironies of such a picture emerging on April 20 I am sure are not lost on many: two days before Earth Day, two days before the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico sank (yes, on Earth Day) and which has now been leaking massive amounts of oil into the ocean for over a month, four days before Senator Lindsey Graham would decide to abandon previously planned talks on climate change legislation and nearly three weeks after President Obama decided to open offshore drilling areas along the Atlantic coastline and in the Gulf of Mexico (which he has just recently reconsidered in light of recent events). The further irony is that, forty years after the very first celebration of Earth Day, America seems to have made as many small steps forward as we have serious strides back.
That is, this photograph and the attendant comics reinforces our own deleterious dependence on oil alongside our all-too-often “so it goes” attitude (which is a perversion of Kurt Vonnegut’s usage, by the way), while depicting a scene that could easily be found in a never-written Vonnegut tale in which oil might have become as abundant as water and, oh, how the Western world rejoiced. What this photograph and these commentaries also reinforce, though, is that both environmental activism and the socio-political exigencies entailing everything from global warming to the creation of renewable energy sources to the acquisition of clean drinking water are no longer local, state or even national issues (and arguably have not been for a long time now). Indeed, the vast and varied social, political, economic, and environmental issues plaguing our world at present are issues that will only continue to impact more and more populations around the globe, and will only continue to exacerbate as we rely on complacency in lifestyles as much as we purport to promote change.
To be sure, some have gone so far as to cite the recent earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and deadly tornadoes as evidence that Mother Nature has had enough. No doubt, if I was Gaia, I would be just as ready to unleash my seismic discontent, to spit fire and retaliate with (other)worldly tumult. Yet this hardly mitigates the real, pressing earthly troubles we face, and does little more to change the fact that for too long our relationship with our natural world has been unclean. Perhaps the real irony, then, is that about which Vonnegut did write shortly before his death in a poem entitled “Requiem,” a snippet of which encapsulates the entire sentiment of the poem and reads like an apology for humankind:
that we know what
we are doing
Indeed, as Paul Wapner pronounces in his new book Living Through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism, we are well beyond protecting the natural world from the ways of humans. The challenge, then, is to work ever harder in a “postnature age” (first dubbed by Bill McKibben in The End of Nature) to establish and maintain an ecological balance, not between humankind and nature, but between the natural world and humankind’s unending quest to attain mastery over it—and perhaps we could begin with a recognition of the relationship of our lives to nature as what Michael Taussig might dub a “mastery of nonmastery.” The fact of the matter is, though, that when the language of activism does not lead to action (and, truly, what we need is progressive legislation and committed resources toward sweeping policy change), the words remain mere words.
There is much talk and much joking about who will “pay” for the clean-up of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I think it should be painfully clear by now that we all end up paying, just not necessarily out of our wallets. So until wide-ranging change—and really, action—occurs, however, many of us will enact small modes of activism in our everyday purchases and practices, and others still will whisper in protest about political inaction; and all the while the children of Ghaziabad will continue to “cool off” (amidst 107 degree heat), the globe will continue to warm up, and more and more we will find that the effects of our environmental degradation creeping closer and closer to home. What is more, we just might have to come to terms with the fact that, if none of us can find a clean place to breath, it will be difficult for any of us to either swim or bathe or…. Either way, it will take more than a magical act of either science or smarts to reverse much of the damage we are doing to our Earthly home. Kidding aside, though, is anyone any good at magic? (Check out this article from The Atlantic for a touch of seriousness to be dashed upon this dish of play)
