“Went to war with the devil and Shaytan/he wore a bad toupee and a spray tan”
-Killer Mike, “Talk to Me,” Run the Jewels 3
I recently underwent a bit of a career overhaul. I’m now a games professor, working in an Interactive Media program, but I started my academic life as a composition and rhetoric instructor. My research focuses have always been with issues of identity, collaboration, expression in digital space, of race and class, etc. I’ve taught things as far flung as creating mix tapes and weaving baskets and things as close-to-the-academic-norm as close-reading poetry and researching history.
One of my favorite topics to work with early in my career was political rhetoric, particularly during election years. Bear in mind, it’s not easy to teach political rhetoric, as there will be radically partisan students in the classroom, and if your personal views run counter to theirs, there can be issues. For a decade, though, I managed to teach about George W. Bush and then about Barack Obama without ever letting my partisan feelings slip into the classroom. Some students would claim that I showed bias, like when I showed Jon Stewart’s Crossfire episode (or the Daily Show where he skewers Glenn Beck), but I would argue–and have successfully– that there’s a difference between using a good source that is partisan and BEING partisan. I know rhetoric well enough to know how to present myself in an impartial and fair way. And I did study political science in a previous life.
Anyone who knows me outside of the classroom knows that I had (and still have) a deep respect for George W. Bush but felt he was a less-than-stellar President. I was pretty sure that most of the rest of his administration were shock troopers for Dick Cheney’s evil empire. Cheney never made sense to me as anything but a comic book villain, right down to the day he shot his friend in the face while out hunting only to have the friend publicly apologize. Likewise, I LOVED Barack Obama. I felt like I got in on the ground floor, finding him in 2004. I was overjoyed when he won the Presidency. I wasn’t as overjoyed with how his terms went, to be honest. But I knew what was going on, and I knew how to keep my own joy or pain out of my classroom.
Things took a turn in the 2012 election. It was difficult to teach basic political rhetorics with Romney/Ryan vs. Obama/Biden because Romney and Ryan did illogical things. I vividly recall a day in the classroom where a student brought up the afternoon in Ohio that Paul Ryan went into a soup kitchen and re-washed clean dishes for a photo opportunity. I was asked how this worked rhetorically.
That was a moment of mild crisis for me. I struggled to talk about how things functioned, but in order to teach that moment correctly, I had to say something that students could interpret as me being partisan. I had to explain that Ryan was concerned with his image enough to do something completely illogical around a group of people who were aware he was doing something just to get a photo taken. It was a bad decision by Ryan and there wasn’t a way to explain the logic that didn’t sound judgmental.
A few weeks later, there were binders full of women, and explaining that one was likewise difficult. It wasn’t that it was hard to explain what was happening in those moments (Romney spoke poorly, as he did with the leaked recording about the 48%). It was that one side of the binary American political debate had fallen into a rut of simply saying unfortunate things. To explain them rhetorically meant to judge them to a certain degree (at least in the eyes of some), because the reality of rhetoric is that rhetoric is at times very much a judgmental lens for looking at the world.
This was the first Presidential election of my career that I didn’t teach a political rhetorics course. In a way, I was sad when we were ramping into the election, as I enjoy reinvigorating my political science training and I like to help young people to understand the value of the process and how to pick a candidate.
But I dodged a bullet.
I have no fucking idea how to teach the Rhetoric of Trump, other than to explain what Socrates and Plato used to say about rhetoric and to shake my head. We live in an era of “alternative facts,” under a President who has declared the press the enemy. He keeps either making things up or giving so little regard for fact checking that he might as well have made things up. Yesterday he apparently talked about the terrorist problem in Sweden, which I can only guess was The Bowling Green Massacre II: IKEA Meatball Boogaloo.
We all just need to watch Stephen Colbert’s piece on Wikiality. That’s what this is. Truthiness rules the day. And it’s not funny. It’s scary as hell.
Here’s the world’s shortest political rhetoric lecture:
In 2016, America elected a narcissistic TV personality who was previously a moderately real estate developer who wisely (or poorly) abused the system. He loves to put his name on things. He doesn’t care about facts. He knows that you can win an argument by being loud and using ad hominem attacks, so he does. He’s either not intelligent, or in a more terrifying potential scenario he’s a genius who behaves like someone who is not intelligent. Nothing he says necessarily correlates to reality. He doesn’t revere the Constitution enough to illustrate any care with violating it. His political operatives are like a Pokemon style collection of the 8 years of angry Republicans who tried to turn the Obama Presidency into gridlock. In the Trump world, Glenn Beck makes sense. Lindsay Graham is a voice of moderate reason.
You cannot look at this President realistically and not be branded his enemy. I wanted him to do well. Not because I particularly like him. I think he’s bad for the country. But he’s what the country chose, somehow. He’s what we get for as long as he’s in office (4 years, maybe 8?).
But if we look at him realistically, we become the enemies he’s already branding.
So the truth is our President abuses rhetoric just like he abuses the truth.
But whoever told you that is his enemy.