Like many folks, I've been thinking about Saadam's death and the public broadcast of his hanging. Today's NYT editorial speaks to a lot of my feelings on the matter: I'm surprised by the shockingly cruel manner of this whole process, the mob atmosphere of the event, the lack of responsibility claimed by anyone. It's hard to conjure up compassion for this man, yet death is a blow in and of itself.

What stands out to me, however, is the first line of the editorial:

Saddam Hussein deserves no one’s pity. But as anyone who has seen the graphic cellphone video of his hanging can testify, his execution bore little resemblance to dispassionate, state-administered justice.

There's an interesting cluster of ideas--dispassionate, state-administration, and justice. The flipside, of course, would seem to be what Saddam experienced: passionate non-justice. I guess we could go down the usual line of critique about phallocentric cool reason constantly outmatching the feminine passions, but I see something different to say in this cluster. Could we be onto something important here?

A while ago, I commented on the tendency of lefty-types to fight what they saw us "unjust" rhetoric with extremely passioned responses. (Think of that Minutemen protest at Columbia, for example.) The shouting, emotives, and passionate displays seem, well, less than effective. Ann Coulter owes her career to the folks who shout her down during those expensive campus talks. Could it be that dispassionate action/rhetoric is a powerful tool that we have chosen to abandon because of its association with the traditional rationality/emotion binary? If so, how do we reclaim such a tool?

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I've been catching up on discussions about this tricky MLK URL fiasco. Seems that some jerk has created a racist page on Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet the URL (martinlutherking [dot] org) would make it seem as if this is a legit site for learning about King. One trip to the site should make it pretty obvious that this is a racist site with zero cred. Should is the keyword in that sentence. As Jessie Daniels explains, however, the truth is that this realization doesn't hit some vistors:

If you look at the Alexa Web service rankings (which tracks website traffic), for the cloaked white supremacist site (www. martinlutherking. org) and for the legitimate civil rights site put up by the King Center (www.thekingcenter.org), the number of hits are almost identical and in the tens of millions. In my research, young people (ages 15-19) were unable to distinguish between these sites in meaningful ways. One young person referred to both sites as “biased” because one was “created by an individual” (the cloaked site) while the other was “created by King’s widow” (the legitimate site).

Blimey. Obviously, the scary aspect of this site's Google ranking is that students tend to read the first thing that pops up on a search for their topic. That's why some people decided to respond with good ole' fashion Google bombs. Take down the site's chances of being read by raising the Google index of "legit" sites, such as the King Center's page. Still, say the rhetoric folks, it's more important that we teach students to look beyond Google index rankings as some kind of legitimation. Heck, we might even focus on something about ethos. But Google bombs work, too.

This thread around the web caught my attention because I'm currently writing about MLK's rhetoric and the issue of circulation. Notice here that what is at stake here is a rhetorical matter: a distortion of King's actual impact and social effect. Sites like the racist martinlutherking [dot] org risk obscuring the actual message King crafted, as well as his lasting rhetorical legacy. But, at the same time, notice that the rhetorical counter-response has little to do with the content of any message. The Google bomb has more to do with a force of circulation and de-circulation. More powerful (perhaps) than fighting that idiot racist page with counter-discourse is to simple take it "out" of circulation. Break it off from the active ecology. You can do this through Google bombs or by the more savvy "nofollow."

This make me wonder how--or if--we address circulation in rhetorical pedagogy. We are rich in content-oriented pedagogy. (The "fight discourse with discourse" method, if you will.) But what of this "no follow" rhetoric?

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Rhetorics and Technologies - 20th Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition
July 8 - 10, 2007
Call for Papers due: February 15, 2007

The 2007 Rhetorics and Technologies Conference program committee invites you to participate in the biennial Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition to be held July 8 - 10, 2007 on the Penn State University Park campus. Paper submissions (500-word abstracts) will be accepted until February 15, 2007.

For abstract submission and conference details, visit: http://www.outreach.psu.edu/C&I/rhetoric

Featured speakers will include Marilyn Cooper, Michigan Technological University; Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Clarkson University; M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Texas A&M University; David Kirkland, New York University; Carolyn Miller, North Carolina State University; James Porter, Michigan State University; Geoffrey Sirc, University of Minnesota; and Anne Wysocki, Michigan Technological University.

For more than two decades, the Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition has been an important forum for scholars interested in rhetoric and the teaching of writing. This year the conference is celebrating its twentieth anniversary of providing participants with the opportunity to share ideas with leading scholars and to enjoy the intimate and informal setting of The Nittany Lion Inn on the Penn State University Park campus located in State College, Pennsylvania, USA.

Direct queries to Stuart Selber (selber@psu.edu), conference chair.

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I saw this brief blog entry on feeling lonely in graduate school, and it reminded me of the talk I gave to the grad student group here last week. They wanted to know what it's like to make the move from grad school to the world of assistant professor. The strongest response I had was about the absolute loneliness of that transition. While grad school can be an isolated experience, that's nothing like the empty hall feeling of your first year as an Assist. Prof. Your "peers" are no longer the jumble of grad students who are always around. Your "peers" are often older than you, more settled than you, less worried than you about makin' it.

To counter the gloomy sound of that statement, I then suggested a really small thing: blog. Get into the habit of blogging in a network of people who are in similar situations. Lord knows there are no shortage of academic blogs out there. Become one more.

That piece of advice then reminded me of the "warning" I heard in some of my first faculty orientations last year. In one meeting about tenure matters, a group of new liberal arts faculty were told not to "waste time with blogging," lest it hurt our tenure. Horror stories (akin to urban legends about needles in Coke cans) were trotted out of such disasters. At the time, I thought it was simply the advice handed down by people who had a severe disconnection to technology and the social world in a digital age. But now I think the advice is plain cruelty.

Blac(k)ademic, who posts about loneliness, connected with enough others to make a community conversation out of her short observation. I would hope that administrative-types would take note of the emotional effects that this terrible "advice" against blogging has on new faculty members. More than short-sighted, it's unkind.

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• reading

Over at my home blog, I started to think about the kinds of readers I have been (and readers I have known). I began to notice a change in myself as a reader while writing my dissertation, and I hope that I continue to reflect on my reading practices. Many of the folks I've talked to seem to mark graduate school as a time of radical change in the reading process. The reader at the beginning of grad school is not the same reader who eventually takes a job. The kinds of readers we *have* been are often not the kinds of readers we ultimately become. Maturity and time change us all. Not to mention the knocks you start to get once you are read. I think my reading changes came once I gained an ability to just shut up, listen, and stop the lips flapping for a few minutes.

I started a taxonomy of the readers I have known, loved, and been. I would love to keep adding to the list, if only as a reflexive exercise:

- There is the reader who reads for “utility,” or for what you can get out of it. This is the selfish reader, the one who only wants to get the goods that will extend the sounds of her own voice.

- There is the ‘Roid Rage Reader, or the one who reads only to attack and smash the arguments of the “puny” writer before her. This is the reader who thinks her job is to be always critical, but it actually turns her into a bully who never connects with anything but “dead meat.”

- There is the immobile reader, or the one who is not willing to move one inch off her own comfortable positions. She’s the saddest reader because she doesn’t realize how her muscles are slowly eroding through the lack of resistance against her own position. This reader is like dead wood, rotten and hollow inside.

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I listen to Rush Limbaugh from time to time. The words that flow from his mouth are simply amazing sometimes. Here's a golden nugget I just heard a few minutes ago:

"The population is about to hit an all-time high in the U.S. Imagine if all those liberals weren't aborting themselves. Think of how many abortions there have been since 1973, and almost all of them are liberals and Democrats. Gee, I guess if there has to be abortion, they might as well be liberals. Maybe it's not such a bad thing after all."

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• profession
• publishing

A quick question about professional practices. I am thinking of sending in an article to a journal whose editor happens to be one of my article's most-cited references. The references are positive, even serving as a framework for my main argument. I'm wondering if it's wise to submit this article to the journal, however, since the editor may be reluctant to publish something that might *appear* to be self-serving (or ego stroking, for lack of a better term).

Am I getting too meta? In a more general sense, this is a question about the politics of publishing when the editor happens to also be a "player" in the field. I know people who avoid certain arguments because of their negative critique of the editor (as author). But what about the flip side?

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• advertisements
• campaigns

Call me a fisher, but this recent Rick Santorum ad seems over the top with anti-semitic appeals. I happened to see this commercial the other day, and I couldn't believe my eyes. Besides the fact that it's a bunch of hooey, the visuals suggest that Casey is involved with a bunch of shyster (read: Jews). Not surprisingly, the actor chosen to play "Casey's 'hand-picked finance chairman'" has stereotypically Jewish features. And--also not surprisingly--the actual person to whom Santorum is referring is Robert Feldman, a Jewish business man. (Feldman also gave a large donation to the Santorum campaign, but never mind that fact.)

Although I have seen a few critiques here and there of this racist advertisement, it has not been mentioned in public much at all. I think Santorum should be called out for this use of racist appeals. In the age of hyper-testing, there is no way Santorum's team could not have "seen" this appeal being used in the commercial. There are no accidental or careless images in these highly polished campaign ads. It's just plain wrong.

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• profession

When are rhetoric and composition studies finally going to get their own rumor mills?

Lisa L. Everett says the rumor mill in theoretical physics was a topic of conversation during her interview at Brown University last year. By the time the young physicist visited the campus, the rumor mill had already revealed that she had two job offers in hand.

"Right away the chairman at Brown said: 'I see the rumor page, and I know you have this offer and that offer. What are your thoughts about coming here?'" she says. "Once people know you have offers, instead of having to sell yourself, people look at you differently."

How come theoretical physics gets to have all the fun?

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I'm searching for works that might not exist just yet. While there are plenty of histories of specific "schools" of rhetoric (sophistic, Roman, etc.), I wonder if there is a theoretical treatment on the concept of "rhetoric schools" themselves. In other words, I am less interested in the history of schools than I am in the reflection on rhetorical school-ing in general. I have looked high (though not very low), and I come up empty headed. . . er, empty handed. Any suggestions? I would also love to hear if any of you have given much thought to the rhetoric school. Unfortunately, pedagogy as a concept tends to be lumped into a giant mass. There is plenty of attention to *pedagogies*, of course, but not so much on pedagogy as a practice, a way of being. And I am not really convinced that "pedagogy" is a synonym for what we might call "schools" of rhetoric. Insofar as "schools" tend to still exist in the near past (think the Chicago school), it is this concept (?) that I am thinking about in my spare time.

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