Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture, edited by Lester Olson, Cara Finnegan, and Diane Hope (SAGE, 2008)
"Imagine four separate critical anthologies, all excellent and useful, each devoted to a specialized subject area within a broad disciplinary topic, and each containing a useful survey of the subject's historical context and intellectual pedigree and a brief introduction to the ensuing articles that demonstrate the current thinking within the field from a variety of useful perspectives. Combine these hypothetical titles into a single volume, add a statement of scope and purpose that combines personal history with an excellent survey of the intellectual and academic milieu out of which the specialized subjects arose, and one has the present title. Lunsford (Stanford), Wilson (Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities), and Eberly (Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park) offer 32 chapters in four divisions: "Historical Studies in Rhetoric," "Rhetoric across the Disciplines," "Rhetoric and Pedagogy," and "Rhetoric and Public Discourse." The many contributors remind the reader that rhetoric today is an ever-expanding, inclusive subject best characterized as an interdisciplinary creature ranging freely across (and even beyond) the fields of English, composition and writing, and communications. In its theory and applied practice, rhetoric has become something greater than the Greeks imagined, something better identified as meta-rhetoric, unlimited by its current conception and reevaluation of what "rhetorical" means.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty."
(A.P. Church CHOICE magazine )
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Finally a Progressive Budget
President Obama’s new budget is, well, audacious -- not just because it includes several big, audacious initiatives (universally affordable health care, and a cap-and-trade system for coping with global warming, for starters) but also because it represents the biggest redistribution of income from the wealthy to the middle class and poor this nation has seen in more than forty years.
The budget that President Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters. . . .David Leonhardt, "A Bold Plan Sweeps Away Reagan Ideas," New York Times, 26 February 2009.
More than anything else, the proposals seek to reverse the rapid increase in economic inequality over the last 30 years. They do so first by rewriting the tax code and, over the longer term, by trying to solve some big causes of the middle-class income slowdown, like high medical costs and slowing educational gains. . . .
Before becoming Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers liked to tell a hypothetical story to distill the trend. The increase in inequality, Mr. Summers would say, meant that each family in the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution was effectively sending a $10,000 check, every year, to the top 1 percent of earners.
Government Talk Pretty One DayAlan Wolfe, "Government Talk Pretty One Day," The New Republic, 26 February 2009.
Talk about judges making up law out of whole cloth--that, pretty much, is what the U. S. Supreme Court has just done. In Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, the Court, by a unanimous vote, concluded that a somewhat offbeat religious group has no right to place a monument touting what it calls the Seven Aphorisms on public land that already features a monument to the Ten Commandments.
A unanimous verdict suggests that Summum was on shaky legal grounds to begin with. But the decision of Samuel Alito, endorsed by the other conservative judges, relied on reasoning that drew strong objection from some of the Court's more liberal members. It's not complicated, Alito argued. The government, like any individual--or, for that matter, corporation--has the right to free speech. If it chooses to say that one religion's teachings should be represented in public and another's should not be, telling it that such a act constitutes discrimination in favor of one religion and against another is tantamount to denying the government its right to say whatever it wants. . . .
The Updike opus is so vast, so varied and rich, that we will not have its full measure for years to come. We have lived with the expectation of his new novel or story or essay so long, all our lives, that it does not seem possible that this flow of invention should suddenly cease. We are truly bereft, that this reticent, kindly man with the ferocious work ethic and superhuman facility will write for us no more.
In the fall of 1933, Sherwood Anderson left his home in New York City and set out on a series of journeys that would take him across large sections of the American South and Midwest. He was engaged in a project shared by many of his fellow writers -- including James Agee, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, and Louis Adamic -- all of whom responded to the Great Depression by traveling the nation's back roads and hinterlands hoping to discover how economic disaster had affected the common people. . . .Sean McCann, "Will This Crisis Produce a 'Gatsby'?" Wall Street Journal, 21 February 2009.
In particular, Anderson found the people he met to be imprisoned by what he called the "American theory of life" -- a celebration of personal ambition that now seemed cruelly inappropriate. "We Americans have all been taught from childhood," Anderson wrote, "that it is a sort of moral obligation for each of us to rise, to get up in the world." In the crisis of the Depression, however, that belief appeared absurd. The United States now confronted what Anderson called "a crisis of belief." . . .
This is the sort of clarity that FDR brought to the Fireside Chats, and a promising sign of things to come.Our housing crisis was born of eroding home values, but it was also an erosion of our common values, and in some case, common sense. It was brought about by big banks that traded in risky mortgages in return for profits that were literally too good to be true; by lenders who knowingly took advantage of homebuyers; by homebuyers who knowingly borrowed too much from lenders; by speculators who gambled on ever-rising prices; and by leaders in our nation's capital who failed to act amidst a deepening crisis. (Applause.)
So solving this crisis will require more than resources; it will require all of us to step back and take responsibility. Government has to take responsibility for setting rules of the road that are fair and fairly enforced. Banks and lenders must be held accountable for ending the practices that got us into this crisis in the first place. And each of us, as individuals, have to take responsibility for their own actions. That means all of us have to learn to live within our means again and not assume that -- (applause) -- and not assume that housing prices are going to go up 20, 30, 40 percent every year.
there are two different groups of homeowners who are at risk of foreclosure.The first group is made up of people who cannot afford their mortgages and have fallen behind on their monthly payments. Many took out loans they were never going to be able to afford, while others have since lost their jobs. About three million households — and rising — fall into this category. Without help, they will lose their homes.
The second group is far larger. It is made up of the more than 10 million households that can afford their monthly payments but whose houses are worth less than what is owed on their mortgages. In real estate parlance, they are underwater.
The stimulus bill is only a first step on [an] arduous path. The biggest mistake [President Obama] can make now is to be too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama’s clout, the stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on.
The global economic crisis has become the biggest near-term U.S. security concern, sowing instability in a quarter of the world's countries and threatening destructive trade wars, U.S. intelligence agencies reported on Thursday.The director of national intelligence's annual threat assessment also said al Qaeda's leadership had been weakened over the last year. But security in Afghanistan had deteriorated and Pakistan had to gain control over its border areas before the situation could improve.
"The financial crisis and global recession are likely to produce a wave of economic crises in emerging market nations over the next year," said the report. A wave of "destructive protectionism" was possible as countries find they cannot export their way out of the slump.
In Congress, the economic recovery legislation passed with zero Republican votes in the House of Representatives and three Republican votes in the Senate.
see also:
"HEARING OF THE SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE ANNUAL WORLDWIDE THREAT ASSESSMENT"
Walter Pincus and Toby Warrick, "Economic Crisis Called Top Security Threat to U.S.," Washington Post, 13 February 2009.
And I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach — a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years. The best may not lack all conviction, but they seem alarmingly willing to settle for half-measures. And the worst are, as ever, full of passionate intensity, oblivious to the grotesque failure of their doctrine in practice.
The neo-Hoovers criticizing today’s stimulus package make perfectly valid points about this or that flaw in the stimulus package. But the alternative is perhaps three million fewer jobs and the national economy looking like a balloon losing air.
Another thing: those railing against the stimulus are often the same folks who inherited an economy producing budget surpluses and transformed it into today’s fiscal catastrophe.
Abraham Lincoln papers are available on line at The Library of Congress and at the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project.
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