Rhetoric

Congratulations are apparently in order to Mr. Huckabee, both for his win in Iowa and for his familiarity with the classical rhetorical figures. While I’m not in a position to say anything about Mr. Huckabee’s forthrightness or his politics, it was at least amusing to see him on December 31 taking advice more than 2,000 years old:

Occultatio est cum dicimus nos praeterire aut non scire aut nolle dicere id quod nun maxime dicimus, hoc modo: …”Non dico te ab sociis pecunias cepisse; non sum in eo occupatus quod civitates, regna, domos omnium depeculatus es; furta, rapinas omnes tuas omitto.” Haec utilis est exornatio si aut ad rem quam non pertineat aliis ostendere, quod occulte admonuisse prodest, aut longum est aut ignobile. Rhetorica ad Herennium IV.xxvi.37

In Harry Caplan’s 1954 translation:

Paralipsis occurs when we say that we are passing by, or do not know, or refuse to say precisely what we are now saying, as follows: … “I do not mention that you have taken monies from our allies; I do not concern myself with your having despoiled the cities, kingdoms, and homes of them all. I pass by your thieveries and robberies, all of them.” This figure is useful if employed in a matter which it is not pertinent to call specifically to the attention of others, because there is advantage in making only an indirect reference to is, or because the direct reference would be tedious and undignified.

Mr. Huckabee, it would seem, knows his pseudo-Cicero, although I’m not quite as inclined as the New York Times is to call his recent performance in telling reporters that he would not air his negative ad about Mr. Romney (and then showing them the ad he wouldn’t air) “remarkable,” unless it’s in his savvy deployment of paralipsis / occultatio / praeteritio by proxy. However, it did get me into an interesting discussion with a colleague of what the device is actually called. You’ll notice that Harry Caplan takes the Greek term paralipsis as a translation for the Latin occultatio, which is what my colleague wanted to call what Huckabee did, with the emphasis on hiding or obscuring. I had always understood the figure to be referred to as praeteritio, though, with the emphasis (as in pseudo-Cicero’s infinitive praeterire) on ostensibly passing something by, which seems more appropriate to the quoted examples.

So I’m left with a distinction that maybe isn’t a difference. I think paralipsis works fine as a catch-all term for the general practice of saying something by saying we’re not going to say it, but I kinda like the fine-grained distinction we see in the Ad Herennium between saying something by obscuring it (occultatio) and saying something by passing it by (praeteritio). Are they two different things?

And if so, which is the more appropriate term for what Mr. Huckabee did?

Three moments from this weekend.

Moment 1: Tink and Zeugma were agitated Saturday morning, and there was a lot of noise from the open front windows as I read and typed. There was a demonstration on Main Street, an anti-Iraq-war parade up to the gate, and I live one block over. And I’ll admit: reader, I couldn’t look.

I knew I wasn’t going to go into work on Saturday, what with Cheney giving the address, but I hadn’t anticipated what it might mean to work from home on a Saturday morning. There was the racket that I usually associate with football games, and then, as I read and typed, there was something else.

Something like: “Morons for peace!”

Something like: “Join the American Communist Party!”

Something like: “Have some marijuana!”

Something like: “Go home, hippie!”

I was flabbergasted. I still am. I know this is an Army town. I served, and I know a lot of the folks in town served, and it means a lot to them. But counterdemonstrators — hecklers — bellowing at “Morons for peace”?

Who in the world, reader, is not for peace, especially among soldiers, who have the most to lose? And so I felt two things I couldn’t reconcile.

The first was anger at what I wanted to categorize as redneck foolishness: for taunts, the ones I heard through my window were as silly and superannuated as one could imagine.

The second was anger at the demonstrators I imagined as so self-righteous and self-absorbed that they’d be foolish enough to try and take away from what my students have done and what they’re going to be called to do. How dare you, I thought, when the first place these kids go is going to be Iraq or Afghanistan, and you have to mar their achievement, on their day, with invective. When they’re so good, so generous, so big-hearted.

When we bury so many.

Moment 2: I drove up to Amherst on Sunday. I saw my attorney, and we dined on beer and sausages, and I saw some other friends as well, who remarked upon Andy Card being booed off the stage at the UMass graduation.

When I saw the video, I howled. I cackled. I loved it. This man, who so publicly lied to so many people, who holds responsibility for the deaths of soldiers via his duplicity, who was refused by even John Ashcroft in a crude and vile attempt to do something illegal — yes, this man was booed off stage by everyone around him, faculty and students alike.

That’s the value of his honorary degree.

Moment 3: Seven years ago, Daniel and I had beers together at Silky’s, in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood. He told me about how easy the Special Forces Q-course was, and how hard other things had been. He was as sweet and intense as he always was.

He was earnest, and I miss him.

Edit: I always get kinda caught up when I think about Daniel. But my bigger point, I guess, was about my different reactions to political demonstrations. My politics make me sympathetic toward the demonstrators in both cases — but in the case of the demonstration here, that sympathy was mixed with frustration at the demonstrators who I saw as in some way diminishing my students’ big day. Toward the students and faculty members who booed Andy Card off the stage, I felt no such frustration. A difference in rhetorical kairos, maybe? The demonstrators on Main Street certainly weren’t winning anyone over to their side, and in fact were probably increasing the antagonism to their position among some observers.

Is it sometimes easier to win support by being quiet?

A while ago, I had lunch with a colleague and we talked about the recent department meeting. Like me, my colleague is a civilian, and like me, my colleague’s politics are progressive, with a strong explicit commitment to social justice that might work against conventional perceptions of the types of academics who teach at military academies. I was feeling embarrassed, having (once again) publicly put my foot in my mouth at the meeting by declaring some strongly felt opinions about the necessary and primary place of revision in writing instruction and the importance of rhetorical sophistication in creating writing assignments that ask students to go beyond reductive and simplistic yes/no up/down good/bad binaries. Not necessarily embarrassed that I’d made the assertions — for those in composition, I think such preferences are mostly self-evident — but embarrassed that I’d managed to seem so “impassioned” and “adamant,” as another colleague described me, and later my boss. Politically speaking, it likely wasn’t the best way for a new professor to position himself in relation to a department that still has some considerable historical misgivings about bringing all this process stuff into the teaching of writing. On the other hand, though, it’s been made clear to me that part of the reason I was hired here was to help contribute to re-orienting the perspective on writing instruction, and so I’m protesting a bit too much: I knew in coming here that I’d be saying things about pedagogy many of my more senior colleagues might not agree with, and I knew as well that my politics would be radically different from the politics of many of my colleagues, and radically different as well from the politics of a majority of my students. No surprise there, right?

I’m not so sure. After the ideological certainties that go along with being a graduate student and teaching assistant at Research 1 schools, and even after my four years as an enlisted soldier, I’m having to learn a radically different teacherly rhetoric with which to engage the cadets in my classes; a rhetoric that’s in many ways far more ideologically attuned to political nuance than what I’ve been used to. After lunch, I met with a cadet in my office, and we talked about the mid-process draft of his most recent essay, where he argued about the relationship between a soldier’s private service ethic and the public perception of why soldiers serve. He invoked David Rozelle, the Captain who had his foot blown off by an anti-tank mine in Iraq and later requested and received a return to a command in Iraq. I asked the cadet if it was possible for people to support such soldiers without supporting the war in Iraq. The cadet was impassioned and adamant: absolutely not. One cannot adequately respect Captain Rozelle without understanding and respecting his beliefs and values.

At the institutions where I taught as a graduate student, I’d have found it easy to dismiss such rhetoric from students as something spoken rather than wholly inhabited; as an idly mouthed rhetorical commonplace rather than a deeply felt credo. Here, though, every single one of my students knows that they incur a five-year service obligation, and that upon graduation their first stop is likely either Iraq or Afghanistan. And as I’ve noted before, they bear that prospect — as they do all things — with complete equanimity. With students whose attitudes and demeanor seem so different from those I’ve encountered elsewhere, then, I’ve had cause to question my own ideology, my own pedagogical practice, my own rhetorical commonplaces and political positions, all in ways that I might not have elsewhere. And yet some of the commonplaces seem so much the same, as well, even as they come from different ideological positions. My lunchtime colleague mentioned his longtime association with certain left-radical coalitions within academia, and the way that they’d closed off communication with him when he came to teach here. As if he were, in a way, a Benedict Arnold to their cause.

I teach at a military academy, and my personal politics are far left, and I see no necessary contradiction there. Certainly, I share the ideals of the peace movement: people should not wage war upon one another. But those are easy ideals to hold. I wonder whether folks in organizations like Rhetoricians for Peace would see someone who works as an educator for the military as a puppet, a stooge, an ignoramus. I wonder, in fact, what they might see as the relationship between peace and the military. Because I think they and my cadets might stand to learn something about commitment and idealism from one another; about rhetorics easy and hard.

The elections are weeks away, and tonight I’m grading papers and continuing to refine a writing assignment that asks students to engage with difficult texts on vexed topics in ways that require some attention to one’s own politics. In coming up with lead-in exercises, I’ve again encountered a Web site I’ve used as part of past class exercises, and I’m delighted to see they’ve fleshed out their materials considerably.

One of the things they now include is a quiz, from which I’ll shamelessly steal the following question:

What prominent American Republican said these two things?

1. “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are. . . a few. . . Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

2. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed; those who are cold and are not clothed.”

I hope you might venture a guess in the comments. If you know, or if you Googled, please play nice and don’t spoil the fun.

Bonus discussion question: What sorts of politically correct feminist tree-hugging left-wing hippie peacenik terrorist-loving Democrats and academics can you imagine mouthing such sentiments?

Examples welcomed.