Thanksgiving 1942

Marjory Collins, "Neffsville, Pennsylvania. Saying grace before carving the turkey at Thanksgiving dinner in the home of Earle Landis." November 1942. FSA-OWI photographs, Library of Congress. 

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8d10749

Veterans Day

John Vachon. War Veteran Selling Pencils. Omaha, Nebraska. November 1938.

FSA-OWI Collection. Library of Congress. LC-USF33- 001276-M5. fsa 8a03797
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8a03797

A Victory Over Suppression? by Elizabeth Drew | NYRblog

"Despite their considerable efforts the Republicans were not able to buy or steal the election after all. Their defeat was of almost Biblical nature. The people, Democratic supporters of the president, whose votes they had plotted, schemed, and maneuvered—unto nearly the very last minute—to deny rose up and said they wouldn’t have it. If they had to stand in line well into the night to cast their vote they did it. The lines were the symbol of the 2012 election—at once awe-inspiring and enraging. . . ."

A Victory Over Suppression? by Elizabeth Drew | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

Professors of Persuasion

Running for president? Call a professor. From the New York Times:

      This election season the Obama campaign won a reputation for drawing on the tools of social science. The book “The Victory Lab,” by Sasha Issenberg, and news reports have portrayed an operation that ran its own experiment and, among other efforts, consulted with the Analyst Institute, a Washington voter research group established in 2007 by union officials and their allies to help Democratic candidates.

      Less well known is that the Obama campaign also had a panel of unpaid academic advisers. The group — which calls itself the “consortium of behavioral scientists,” or COBS — provided ideas on how to counter false rumors, like one that President Obama is a Muslim. It suggested how to characterize the Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, in advertisements. It also delivered research-based advice on how to mobilize voters. . . .

Benedict Carey, "Academic 'Dream Team' Helped Obama's Efforts," New York Times, 12 November 2012.

Prisoners of Conscience

Gerard A. Hauser, Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2012).

from the publisher:

Prisoners of Conscience continues the work begun by Gerard A. Hauser in Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres, winner of the National Communication Association's Hochmuth Nichols Award. In his new book, Hauser examines the discourse of political prisoners, specifically the discourse of prisoners of conscience, as a form of rhetoric in which the vernacular is the main source of available appeals and the foundation for political agency.


Hauser explores how modes of resistance employed by these prisoners constitute what he deems a "thick moral vernacular" rhetoric of human rights. Hauser's work considers in part how these prisoners convert universal commitments to human dignity, agency, and voice into the moral vernacular of the society and culture to which their rhetoric is addressed.


Hauser grounds his study through a series of case studies, each centered on a different rhetorical mechanism brought to bear in the act of resistance.Through a transnational rhetorical analysis of resistance within political prisons, Hauser brings to bear his skills as a rhetorical theorist and critic to illuminate the rhetorical power of resistance as tied to core questions in contemporary humanistic scholarship and public concern.

Sam Becker

From the website of the Department of Communication, University of Iowa:

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies Samuel L. "Sam" Becker died on Thursday, November 8, 2012, at the age of 89. Professor Becker, a UI alumnus, was a beloved figure for the University of Iowa, the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the Department of Communication Studies, and the countless students, faculty colleagues, staff members, and community members who were touched by his more than 70 years of scholarship, mentorship, and friendship at the UI. Our College extends its deepest condolences to Sam's family. . . .

 Sam Becker was one of the great leaders in the discipline of Communication.

photo--from the University of Iowa, Department of Communication web site.

Stealing the Vote

When I voted this morning in State College, PA, the voters ahead of me in line were simply handing their driver's licenses to the check-in woman behind the table as they approached. I didn't do that, but said, "Good morning." The woman said, "May I see your ID?"

I found myself saying, "I understand the Court has ruled that you can ask, but has also ruled that I don't need to show it." "Well, that is correct," she said. "But you will have to next time." "Unless the Court rules against the Voter ID bill again," I found myself saying. All this was very polite, but I'll admit I felt a certain chill from the ladies behind the table--ladies I'd seen and thanked every election for the past 40 or so years at our local polling place. So, I was asked to spell my name, and then asked, as were all the others, to sign my name on the page next to where my name appears in the registry of voters. And then I voted.

See also

Elizabeth Drew, "Voting Wrongs," New York Review of Books, NYR Blogs, 21 September 2012.

Speechwriting

Nice piece by Robert Lehrman in today's New York Times -- on political speechwriting.

Much of what lures speechwriters is the prospect of reaching so many people about ideas we think so important — as Peggy Noonan did for Mr. Bush in 1989 (“thousand points of light”) ; Bob Shrum did for Edward M. Kennedy in 1980 (“the dream shall never die”); and Matt Scully did for Sarah Palin in 2008 (“If character is the measure in this election …”).

I have passed no bill, stopped no war, created no policy that would bring health insurance to a single person. But if we expect to see such results solely from our work, that dooms many to disappointment. There’s plenty to celebrate about being part of the team. . . .

Robert Lehrman, "The Political Speechwriter's Life," New York Times, 5 November 2012.

Penn State Presidential Debate Watch

African Yearbook of Rhetoric

The African Yearbook of Rhetoric is now available online:


Welcome to the African Yearbook of Rhetoric
 
The African Yearbook of Rhetoric (ISSN: 2220-2188) is a multi-lingual, peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to the development of rhetoric studies on, and in Africa. Some special issues are released under the imprint of The Elephant and the Obelisk.

From October 2012 the Yearbook is freely accessible on this site.

The copyright to all materials is held by AfricaRhetoric Publishing and downloads made for public usage must be acknowledged.

All correspondence to: africarhetoric@rhetoricafrica.org
 
South African painter Toni Bico (www.tonibico.com) is contributing original cover illustrations. (Book Covers)

List of Volumes
 
Vol. 1, Gender Rhetoric: North-South, September 2010.
Vol. 2, 1, Rhetorics of justice in post-societies, July 2011.
Vol. 2, 2 Under the Baobab. To Honour Stuart Saunders on his Eightieth Birthday, under the imprint of The Elephant and the Obelisk, August 2011.
Vol. 2, 3, The Great Liberation Speeches of Africa, December 2011.
Vol. 3, 1, Surveillance/Rhetorics, March 2012.
Vol. 3, 2, New Beginnings: Argentina and South Africa, June 2012.
Vol. 3, 3, Diplomatic Rhetoric in the South, November 2012.
Vol. 4, 1, Rhetoric of Statecraft in Africa, March 2013.

The Debate

              photo: npr


What a disappointing debate, and I'm still trying to sort it out. By now, almost 24 hours after the first presidential debate on October 3, 2012, the press has told us all that Mitt Romney was dominant, energetic, upbeat, prepared, aggressive.

Looking at this as a rhetorical critic, I can see the way the Romney-wins! scenario comes together for the press and for many viewers. Looking at it as a citizen (of course with political perspectives of my own) I see the story very differently.

I didn't see it that way, though I found the event as a whole depressing. President Obama and Jim Lehrer both, for seemingly different reasons, deferred to a Mitt Romney who interrupted, who filibustered, and who would not be either responsive to or guided by the moderator.

Jim Lehrer -- it seems to me that as theater the obvious reading was that Jim Lehrer was too diffident, too deferential to Mitt Romney, and perhaps too old to exert the force necessary to reign in the candidate. My own reading is different, but I don't think it will be the dominant reading -- I think Jim Lehrer, one of the great TV journalists, was genuinely hoping to get the candidates talking and to stay out of their way.

Barack Obama -- again, from the point of view of theater, especially in the morning after, the interpretation is that President Obama lacked energy (must have wished he weren't there), and seemed unprepared. I think otherwise, but again I recognize that my understanding is shaped by my preferences and hopes. I thought President Obama was stunned to find Mitt Romney simply lying, taking positions very different from those he has been advocating for the past year, and that he chose not to call him on it directly. After all, if the president calls someone a liar, especially in the middle of a debate, that's an even bigger decorum violation than Mitt Romney's lies and aggressiveness.

Mitt Romney -- the press seems to agree that he had the fighting spirit, and that's been ruled the winning combination the morning after. But I saw Romney as refusing to stick to agreed upon time limits, and simply filibustering. At one crucial point, as I saw it, Romney in effect challenged the president to call him a liar, when he said that he would cut taxes and do so in a way that would not decrease revenue. But that's either a lie (when compared to his earlier campaign numbers, such as they are) or it is magical thinking -- that is, that if we drastically lower taxes, the economy will boom and revenues will go up on their own even with lower rates. We've heard that one before. Here it comes again. Romney also presented a new persona at the debate; gone (for the moment) was the "severely conservative" Romney of the primary debates; last night we saw a man imitating a center-right-wing pragmatist with a whole new set of talking points. As a citizen, this, for me, reinforces the sense that though Romney argues as if from deep inner conviction, he does not seem to carry his principles from one tactical situation to another. As a rhetorical maneuver last night, I can see how it worked its appeal.

Supreme Court and McCarthy

  Robert M. Lichtman. The Supreme Court and McCarthy-Era Repression: One Hundred Decisions (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012).

from the publisher:

In this volume, attorney Robert M. Lichtman provides a comprehensive history of the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in "Communist" cases during the McCarthy era. Lichtman shows the Court's vulnerability to public criticism and attacks by the elected branches during periods of political repression. The book describes every Communist-related decision of the era (none is omitted), placing them in the context of political events and revealing the range and intrusiveness of McCarthy-era repression.

In Fred Vinson's term as chief justice (1946–53), the Court largely rubber-stamped government action against accused Communists and "subversives." After Earl Warren replaced Vinson as chief justice in 1953, however, the Court began to rule against the government in "Communist" cases, choosing the narrowest of grounds but nonetheless outraging public opinion and provoking fierce attacks from the press and Congress. Legislation to curb the Court flooded Congress and seemed certain to be enacted. The Court's situation was aggravated by its 1954 school-desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which led to an anti-Court alliance between southern Democrats and anti-Communists in both parties. Although Lyndon Johnson's remarkable talents as Senate majority leader saved the Court from highly punitive legislation, the attacks caused the Court to retreat, with Felix Frankfurter leading a five-justice majority that decided major constitutional issues for the government and effectively nullified earlier decisions. Only after August 1962, when Frankfurter retired and was replaced by Arthur Goldberg, did the Court again begin to vindicate individual rights in "Communist" cases--its McCarthy era was over.

Demonstrating keen insight into the Supreme Court's inner workings and making extensive use of the justices' papers, Lichtman examines the dynamics of the Court's changes in direction and the relationships and rivalries among its justices, including such towering figures as Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Earl Warren, William O. Douglas, and William J. Brennan, Jr. The Supreme Court and McCarthy-Era Repression: One Hundred Decisions tells the entire story of the Supreme Court during this unfortunate period of twentieth-century American history.

Development Rhetoric

 Jenny Rice. Distant Publics: Development Rhetoric and the Subject of Crisis. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.






from the publisher:

Urban sprawl is omnipresent in America and has left many citizens questioning their ability to stop it. In Distant Publics, Jenny Rice examines patterns of public discourse that have evolved in response to development in urban and suburban environments. Centering her study on Austin, Texas, Rice finds a city that has simultaneously celebrated and despised development. Rice outlines three distinct ways that the rhetoric of publics counteracts development: through injury claims, memory claims, and equivalence claims. In injury claims, rhetors frame themselves as victims in a dispute. Memory claims allow rhetors to anchor themselves to an older, deliberative space, rather than to a newly evolving one. Equivalence claims see the benefits on both sides of an issue, and here rhetors effectively become nonactors.  Rice provides case studies of development disputes that place the reader in the middle of real-life controversies and evidence her theories of claims-based public rhetorics. She finds that these methods comprise the most common (though not exclusive) vernacular surrounding development and shows how each is often counterproductive to its own goals. Rice further demonstrates that these claims create a particular role or public subjectivity grounded in one’s own feelings, which serves to distance publics from each other and the issues at hand. Rice argues that rhetoricians have a duty to transform current patterns of public development discourse so that all individuals may engage in matters of crisis. She articulates its sustainability as both a goal and future disciplinary challenge of rhetorical studies and offers tools and methodologies toward that end.

Toward Los Angeles, California (LOC)

Toward Los Angeles, California (LOC), a photo by The Library of Congress on Flickr.

Photograph by Dorothea Lange, March 1937, from the FSA/OWI collection, Library of Congress. 

Hollywood's CIA -- the CIA's Hollywood

Tricia Jenkins, The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).

from the publisher:

"What’s your impression of the CIA? A bumbling agency that can’t protect its own spies? A rogue organization prone to covert operations and assassinations? Or a dedicated public service that advances the interests of the United States? Astute TV and movie viewers may have noticed that the CIA’s image in popular media has spanned this entire range, with a decided shift to more positive portrayals in recent years. But what very few people know is that the Central Intelligence Agency has been actively engaged in shaping the content of film and television, especially since it established an entertainment industry liaison program in the mid-1990s.

"The CIA in Hollywood offers the first full-scale investigation of the relationship between the Agency and the film and television industries. Tricia Jenkins draws on numerous interviews with the CIA’s public affairs staff, operations officers, and historians, as well as with Hollywood technical consultants, producers, and screenwriters who have worked with the Agency, to uncover the nature of the CIA’s role in Hollywood. In particular, she delves into the Agency’s and its officers’ involvement in the production of The Agency, In the Company of Spies, Alias, The Recruit, The Sum of All Fears, Enemy of the State, Syriana, The Good Shepherd, and more. Her research reveals the significant influence that the CIA now wields in Hollywood and raises important and troubling questions about the ethics and legality of a government agency using popular media to manipulate its public image."

See also

Oliver Boyd-Barrett, David Herrera, and James A. Baumann, Hollywood and the CIA: Cinema, Defense, and Subversion (New York: Routledge, 2011).

 David L. Robb, Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors Movies (Prometheus Books, 2004).

. . .  there is a fairly extensive scholarly literature on the more general subject of film and government.

Occurrent Arts

Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011).

from the publisher:

***

"Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of "semblance" as a way to approach this question.

"It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: "lived abstraction." A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance toinvestigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented--variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention--which he refers to collectively as the "occurrent arts." Massumi argues that traditional art practices, including perspective painting, conventionally considered to be object-oriented freeze frames, also organize events of perception, and must be considered occurrent arts in their own way. Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance.

"The artwork's relational engagement, Massumi continues, gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aesthetic dimension. Massumi investigates occurrent art practices in order to examine, on the broadest level, how the aesthetic and the political are always intertwined in any creative activity."

***

Deconstruct This

Brian Cogan, ed., Deconstructing South Park: Critical Examinations of Animated Transgression (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).

from the publisher:

***

"Deconstructing South Park: Critical Examinations of Animated Transgression is an edited collection by Brian Cogan that looks at the long and controversial run of one of the most subversive programs on television. South Park, while denounced by many as simply scatological, is actually one of the most nuanced and thoughtful programs on television. The contributors to South Park reveal that, through the lens of four foul-mouthed nine year olds, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have created one of the most astute forms of social and political commentary in television history.

"Deconstructing South Park, itself the most ambitious deconstruction of popular culture to date, analyzes how South Park is not only entertainment, but a commentary on American culture that tackles controversial issues far beyond the depth of most television. Specifically, the medium of animated sitcom allows the show's creators to contribute to cultural conversations regarding disability studies, religion, sexuality, celebrity, and more. If South Park deconstructs American culture, then Cogan and his contributors deconstruct the deconstructionists and reveal South Park in all its hilarious and often contradictory complexity."

***

Political Poster Collection now of Flickr

The Political Poster collection that I donated to Penn State is now available on Flickr -- which permits comments. I am hoping that this will elicit some participants, and perhaps some of the artists, to recall the era. The collection is here.

JFK vs. Rick Santorum

John F. Kennedy to the Houston General Ministerial Association:

 . . . Whatever issue may come before me as president — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject — I will make my decision in accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise. . . .

Rick Santorum's dirty politics

The Rick Santorum pseudo-Democrat Romney robocall . . .