The Unfrozen Caveman Rhetorician is back from his vacation of hunting wooly mammoths and ready to dive into more rhetoric.
No sooner did I get back than Barack Obama’s campaign offered a brace of announcements about upcoming speeches that are worth noting for the way they illuminate the importance of place in rhetoric.
In one case, Obama is hoping to make a speech in Germany in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
In addition to simply being in a foreign country (thereby implying the senator’s foreign policy bonafides), the particular setting—the iconic gate in Berlin—obviously calls to mind speeches given by Ronald Reagan and (even more memorably) John F. Kennedy when they were presidents.
Continue reading ‘UCR on . . . Obama and Scene’
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Do you own the meaning of your own words?
That’s a trickier question than it might seem. Exhibit A: the brouhaha over Don Imus’s latest comments.
If you hadn’t heard, Imus got in trouble when discussing NFL player “Pacman” Jones’s legal troubles. When told Jones had been arrested six times, the “I-Man” asked “What color is he?” And when he was told Jones was African American, Imus said, “Well, there you go. Now we know.”
Continue reading ‘UCR on . . . Don Imus and the Issue of Meaning’
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Don’t you think that Jon Stewart is one of our leading rhetorical critics?
It’s hard not to come to that conclusion given the way he often points out the tactical verbal choices (and mistakes) of public figures.
A perfect case in point is his critique of McCain’s June 3rd speech on the same day as Obama’s speech announcing himself as the presumptive Democratic nominee. After pointing out some of the same juxtaposition issues we discussed in the previous post, Stewart goes on to look at McCain’s attempt to co-opt Obama’s mantra of change and use it as a way of building drama through repetition in his own speech.
Continue reading ‘UCR on . . . McCain’s Failed Antistrophe’
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We had an interesting juxtaposition of rhetorical performances last week with the back-to-back-to-back speeches of McCain, Clinton, and Obama. One of the obvious differences among them was the visual framing or setting of them.
Here is the now-infamous McCain background:
Small crowd + green backdrop = poor framing.
Both Clinton and Obama create visual evocation of populism, using a backdrop of supporters. In Clinton’s case, however, the crowd is smaller and the the venue is literally subterranean (a gymnaseum at a high school in New York).
Compare this with Obama’s speech which also used supporters as a backdrop, but which was given to a much larger crowd and took place, significantly, in the venue where the Republican National Convention will be held.
Presidential politics is, for better or worse, largely about stagecraft. In this instance, Obama was the clear winner.
Of course, I could be wrong; I’m just a caveman.
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For those of you who recollect my earlier blogging in response to He Who Must Not Be Named (or those interested in finding out about it), I’ve got a hypertext “manifesto” published in the latest edition of Kairos, a scholarly journal on rhetoric and composition.
The text includes links to The Counterpoint Blog, a link to the video of HWMBN’s attack on me, relevant articles from Media Matters for America, a link to the radio interview I did with Air America Radio, and assorted other links involving Sinclair Broadcasting, media reform, etc. There are also two short video clips I put together as bookends for the manifesto that put the links into context.
Enjoy!
UCR
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Salon has a fine piece up by Glenn Greenwald in which he catalogs a number of high-profile journalists who’ve described how their bosses influenced them to fall in line with the administration’s narrative about the invasion of Iraq. It’s a good example of how corporate media consolidation serves to undermine democracy.
UCR
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In a speech in Florida, Hillary Clinton again called for the results of the “renegade primaries” in Florida and Michigan to count, something that presumably gives her an advantage, particularly since in Michigan, hers was the only name on the ballot.
The speech is interesting in the way she links her specific claim to broader issues of voting rights and universal suffrage.
One could do an interesting analysis of the way Clinton deploys historical events in a way meant to parallel them to her current situation, attempting to get her audience to transfer their feelings about these past issues of voting fairness to the claim that the Michigan and Florida primaries should count.
I’d like to go a step beyond that, however, and locate the underlying bedrock on which she is making her claims–the collective wisdom, or doxa, that she believes her audience holds that she sees as backing up her argument.
Continue reading ‘UCR on . . . Hillary’s Backing’
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Keith Olbermann’s scathing commentary on George W. Bush’s attitudes toward Iraq delivered last week offers a treasure trove of examples of rhetorical figures, but the one that stands out most (at least to my semi-evolved ears) is antiphrasis.
Antiphrasis, as you etymologists might guess from the two root words that make up the term, means to say something that means the opposite of what you truly mean. In other words, irony.
Continue reading ‘UCR on . . . Olbermann’s Antiphrasis’
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In Salon, Gary Kamiya sizes up a potential McCain/Obama race, focusing largely on the “intangible” qualities of each candidate—the emotions they evoke—rather than policy positions.
Kamiya doesn’t invoke the idea of “generational argument” explicitly, but it’s the clear subtext of his piece. He even goes so far as to say that he is “betting on youth” to carry election day (i.e., Obama).
The notion that different generations react differently to rhetoric is nothing new. We don’t need Zogby or CNN’s Bill Schneider to break down demographic stats to tell us this. Aristotle did 2,400 years ago. While admittedly dealing in generalities, Aristotle noted that the young are changeable and “fickle,” while the elderly are “distrustful,” “cowardly,” and fear the future. Aristotle being Aristotle, he said that the people in the middle are free from either extreme.
Continue reading ‘UCR on . . . Generational Argument’
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I might be the only one on the planet that thinks this, but here it goes . . .
On the occasion of the most recent (and probably not the last) Super Tuesday, I’d like to forward the thesis that Barack Obama’s most recent “troubles” with Reverend Wright are actually a blessing, at least in the medium to long term.
How can I possibly say that given that Obama himself said he’s had a “rough” couple of weeks, largely based on Wright’s performance in several public appearances? I say it because Wright has positioned himself perfectly to be a rhetorical scapegoat for Obama.
Continue reading ‘UCR on . . . Obama’s Scapegoat’
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