Didn’t post last night because Verizon’s web access was down. It’s become practically a daily event for them, which is really frustrating when you’re trying to do Web work. Which is why I’m working on my RSA paper now, instead of getting most of it out of the way last night like I wanted.
And I’m studiously not listening to Bush’s address to the War College in Carlisle (which I always thought was at Fort McNair, in DC, but it turns out Fort McNair — while site of the original Army War College — is actually home to the National Defense University), because I had it on for the first five minutes and simply couldn’t take it. The rhetoric was absolutely predictable, without a single surprise, and the frat-boy smugness of the tone just drove me up the wall. I’ll read it online tomorrow.
But I’ve come up with what I think is a pretty nice, symmetrical setup for my paper: after the introduction, I’ll work through the connections of public rhetoric to the public lives of the Romans, and from there move on to the private lives of the Romans and how self was constructed by contest, and from there move to our private lives today and how students have an interest in rhetorically constructing selves, and from there to our public lives today in the political discourse of weblogs, and the need for an effective public rhetoric that goes beyond the production of subjectivities and into political action. Public Rome, private Rome, private Empire, public Empire: not a bad structure, right? The conclusion will suggest how recent events with Trent Lott and Howard Dean display the power and limitations of the public rhetoric of private citizens, and I’ll probably use that quote from Tacitus about the failures of rhetoric as a final caution.
So with the thunderstorms, I’m just hoping the power stays on.
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