If it’s a Substack post, it’s better than a mere vlog
Here’s my first attempt at Substack video, why did this take so long to do?
Analyzing Andrew Cuomo’s New Political Ad
There’s never a lack of good examples to teach people how easy it is to create realities out of words. This is the best thing about language in my opinion. And it’s not to say that there’s some correct or right way to speak about anything. Speech creates the expectation of its own conclusion.
Andrew Cuomo’s new ad defending himself from all the accusations of sexual harassment is a great example of what we call equivocation, a traditional fallacy where it is assumed that a complex term or utterance only has one possible interpretation.
There’s a lot going on in these 30 seconds, and it really is a nice example of rebuttal in a multimodal form. However the equivocation here is that failure to legally prosecute means that Cuomo did no wrong.
This ad could be seen as a wonderful example of equivocation and dismissed as a fallacy right away. The trouble with that analysis is that it misses a lot of things that the advertisement is doing in terms of argument. When you call something a fallacy it leads to ignoring the argument in totality. In this case, the way this ad is put together requires a lot more analysis to really understand how it works.
There are of course many other reasons he should have been forced out such as using state employee time to write his book about defeating COVID while COVID raged, and his dismantling of public health, in particular nursing homes, before the pandemic causing large loss of life that should not have happened.
Cuomo should also be well-aware – actually everyone should – about how difficult it is to prosecute cases on harassment. Most DA’s are risk-averse in prosecuting such cases as they have limited resources and always have the weather-eye out for public opinion.
Also it seems that wrongdoing in the law depends a lot on technical perfection. I think this might be a good thing given the disproportionate effects that a verdict can have on someone. I’m a big fan of restricting the state. However this does not mean that Cuomo is vindicated or innocent. The ad works us into a position to feel that the reason the district attorneys did not prosecute is because they did not see any wrongdoing.
Looking at advertisements like this can be a good way to practice critical thinking exercises with yourself or with others – using something like this shows us how easy it is for us to assume one conclusion is only because of one cause, when there could be myriad reasons for someone to choose not to act.
The power of this spot comes from leaving it up to us to make sense of what’s being presented. As news report after report are flung at us, we feel the weight of something that feels like a universal conclusion – but we are never told what that universal proposition is. It’s much more powerful to have us draw the conclusion ourselves.
By doing it ourselves, we are less likely to challenge it. We also believe that it’s obvious – we drew this conclusion; others would too. It isn’t something to question, it’s not a proposition. Our belief in what the commercial means comes from our own conclusions, not someone telling us what to think. Little things like this have huge impact on whether or not we are going to question something offered to us.
Cuomo delivers a powerful argument as he should, but we should respond in equal measure with critical evaluation. Where are these ideas coming from? Turns out if the conclusion is coming from inside yourself it needs much more scrutiny. Someone might be offering information in such a way to ensure that you have all the choice in the world to evaluate that information in one particular way, toward one particular end.
Is his claim fallacious? Certainly. Is that the best way to understand how it works us over? It’s not enough. There’s more going on here that we ad to the situation that should be analyzed instead of just tossed out with the fallacy bathwater.
The rhetoric of praise and blame in the digital age
Wired magazine usually surprises me in a good way. I’m not prepared for them to take a shot at current electronic popular culture moves, but here we are.
In a recent article, Wired argues that the recent moves to cast Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a Marvel hero, or meme-ing him otherwise is dangerous. It trivializes him as a person, flattens this real human being’s experience into entertainment, and it is, well, just inappropriate and somehow dangerous.
Kate Knibbs writes:
But politicians aren’t meant to be idolized, even in their finest hours. That was, in fact, the point excerpted from Zelensky’s speech. And there is a difference between admiring a leader’s actions and adulating them like a K-pop star. Believing that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is an atrocity and that Zelensky is behaving courageously does not mean that it’s wise to apply the googly-eyed logic of fandom to his actions. In fact, it’s distinctly unwise. Treating Zelensky like a superhero—call it Marvelization—recasts a geopolitical conflict in which real people are really dying into entertainment, into content.
I wonder where this “rule” comes from where a politician is not meant to be idolized. It begs a lot of questions here. But more importantly, it assumes we are idolizing the politician Zelenskyy, not Zelenskyy the man who is – in most people’s opinion in the U.S. I’d say – going well beyond what a politician would do, acting out of synch with typical politician identity and presenting something, well, admirable and noble to us, something that most of us wish we would be able to do but might not be able to do if we were in his position.
What exactly are we to do when we admire someone? What if someone impresses us to the point of embarrassment: I don’t think I could do that even if I knew it was right. I know I’m not alone in thinking at night that if I were in his position, I wonder if I could do what he is doing. Could I make that sacrifice? Could I take on that risk? How much do I really commit to my beliefs?
Such questions are fantastic for exploring what it means to be heroic or admirable. This is not trivialization, but conversation starting. This indicates, in a recognizable language, incredible behavior worth our attention.
Throughout human history we see various figures lionized and compared to literary figures who serve as models for behavior, attitude, or the like. But they are not just models, they are fountains of potential meaning. Comparing Zelenskyy – or meme-ing him into a Captain America image – doesn’t close off possibilities but opens them. What does it mean to act heroically? What’s the comparison here? What’s the feeling, and the thought in the viewer? What is behind the smile of recognition when we view it?
The “memeing” or “Marvelization” of a political figure is just the modern application of what we’ve always done to people who are in leadership roles who do something that is out of character enough to call attention to the gap between “normal” politician behavior and what they are seen doing. It’s tough to call attention to such an obvious “absence,” but that’s what such associations help us do. Look at this unexpected correspondence.
Or better yet, look at this figure that we do not have the words to appreciate in our own terms. I must borrow the words, the images, the meaning from something else. I must grasp for an equivalence, even in fantasy.
It’s incredible for Wired to miss this and call the meme – our pop culture moment – trash in so many words. Also incredibly ignorant to think that entertainment is always preceded by the word “mere,” and never has political import.
The Marvel franchise I don’t really like either, but I can appreciate the direct line between admiration of these fantasy characters and the idea that public figures should attempt to live up to the moral and ethical standards of practice that such figures symbolize. This is such an ancient practice it’s weird to call it historical. We are driven to do this as human beings it seems.
Is it fandom, or out of place hero worship for Walt Whitman to “meme” Abraham Lincoln in “O Captain, My Captain?”
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
This of course is not a meme – it’s one of the best American poems ever written. But the feeling is so similar. Whitman is trying to communicate what Lincoln meant to him and chose a (literal) vehicle to indicate importance and admiration in a way that the reader can appreciate.
The medium wasn’t chosen because it was high-brow, but because it communicated – created thought and feeling in the audience – that would hopefully lean toward admiration and praise. Whitman here is showing through poetry that he wished he could have Lincoln see the crowds of supporters and admirers – the influence – that he had as a leader.
He chose poetry; we’d choose photoshop. The only difference here is some kind of snobbery that Wired, of all outlets, wants to defend. The indication is admiration for someone who we wish more people were like. The method of indicating this – communicating this – should come in the forms that are comfortable and popular in order to indicate and communicate the significance. Popular forms are often debased in their own time, nostalgically fawned over later as high art.
Why do we think memes are trivial? It seems that because they are ours, and in our moment, they are to be mistrusted. They feel flat to us, because they are not seen through a nostalgia for a time when popular culture was something better. But by its nature, pop culture is always of its moment. This doesn’t mean it’s not doing good work.
In addition, the meme indicates the “gap” between our expectations and someone towering above them. We’ve come to expect so little from our politicians and elected figures that it is very difficult to say something really meaningful when they go well beyond our ruined expectations.
Yelenskyy, to most people in the democratic world, represents an elected official who is behaving in heroic ways. These are ways that escape normal conversational modes of making sense. This feeling has to be expressed – but conventional ways don’t show it. You could say that someone is an “awesome” leader or “incredibly brave” but there’s no indication of the extreme nature of the gap there to cover in that articulation. But making Captain America memes out of Zelenskyy conveys that he’s not just a hero or behaving heroically – he is an extreme, beyond belief hero. He’s beyond anything we could expect. The ridiculous nature of the meme is what it is trying to communicate: This man, what he is doing, is as believable as the recognizable superhero.
Here’s another “meme,” this time in a poem from Hermann Melville about John Brown. Was Hermann Melville guilty of Marvelization – the devaluing of someone making a heroic sacrifice for what they thought was just and right – even though they had little chance of success?
Hidden in the cap
Is the anguish none can draw;
So your future veils its face,
Shenandoah!
But the streaming beard is shown
(Weird John Brown),
The meteor of the war.
Appreciation of Brown as a symbol that cannot be denied, even at the moment of his execution, even if they try to cover his face – the war is coming. There’s no way around the powerful symbolism of John Brown’s visage, which, to Melville is the visage of the horrible war.
This kind of expression is simplistic, but that’s how powerful communication happens. A reduction is not a distillation or removal of meaning. It’s not trivialization. When people meme Zelenskyy – just as when they compose verse about someone vital, someone who sacrificed beyond what anyone expected of them – they are adding to the ability of various audiences to appreciate who they are and what they did.
Appreciating how someone sees a person doing something incredible is not universal. It is adjusted in ways that are made meaningful by the creator for the audience. And that audience might not include you. The audience they try to reach is the one they think matters most. The way they do that, the methods used, and the meanings implied are chosen not to be flat, but to be rich. The mistake Wired makes is thinking that this is a flattening of value when its’ just not made for them to appreciate.
Zelenskyy memes are encouraging us to notice now what’s happening, how he’s acting, and are attempting – in their own weird way, like pop culture always does – to celebrate, praise, and honor actions that might not be fully appreciated in the moment they are happening. They also might not include us, which is the reality of rhetoric, where speakers really want to reach audiences they care about, getting their attention in ways that they think are powerful and meaningful – but just to them.
I wouldn’t exactly say I am missing debate ha ha ha
At lunch yesterday – “Do you miss debate?”
“I do every day.” I had to be honest in that moment for some reason. My typical answer, from the PR office, is “not one bit.” But perhaps the senior staff wasn’t in and an intern answered that call.
I had to be honest. Is this my honest response? I think so.
But what is it I miss?
The mismanaged tournaments? Arranging the travel? Worried about what could happen to students on trips (the horrors of imagination always had a death-grip on me, from twisted ankle to much, much worse)? Colleagues who had all the intellectual depth and rigor of a little league coach? Topics that were worse than irrelevant? Principles and practices that ran counter to what research tells us about reason, persuasion and rhetoric?
Why was that the answer? I still have no idea. Writing this the day after though is helping me work it out, and here’s what I have.
Teaching debate is teaching poesis, or making, with something that is so human – language – although perhaps not uniquely human. It’s good to keep that debate alive perhaps. But the human misuse of symbols to communicate (Burke) is a very rewarding thing to practice. And practicing it is all we do in debate programs. All we should do anyway.
There are a vast majority of debate programs where “border patrol” is the order of the day: These arguments will always win, these won’t; This is the correct way to talk about this issue, this one is the discourse of evil people. Arguments are evaluated on the heart, not on the audience. There are no audiences in intercollegiate debate, there’s only liturgy that must be recited properly.
I was hoping that we’d eliminate these debate programs but they seem alive and well, the tournament continues to live even though the head was removed and buried in 2020. Hydras never die, they can lose a lot of heads and be fine.
I don’t miss any of this. My life is better without this as a part of my life. But the weekly meetings and the idea of working on creating something is what I miss.
More particularly, I miss the idea that debate starts with a student utterance. It doesn’t start with the teacher or professor’s utterance. It’s about the students offering a “lecture” and the teacher “responding.”
If done right it’s student driven. The students respond. If done at the highest level, there is no student, there is no professor. The classroom and university dissolve: The best level.
Never got there myself but that promise, or that possibility or hope – whatever you’d like to call it – that the words generated by students but not as students had latent power in them enough to dissolve the nearly immutable power relations of the campus to the point where we really could start with the basics, or “from scratch,” maybe the oldest form of communication. It’s also not lost on me that Scratch is the name of the devil in one of my favorite pieces of writing The Devil and Daniel Webster.
This is what I miss: The possibility of the dissolution of all restrictive organizations of the university through doing what the (contemporary) university cannot imagine and forbids the possibility of: Student creation of meaning on their own terms. If I could recover this without the tournaments, the idiots, the foul practices, and the egos, I’d be there. The least likely place for this to bubble up again besides the cafeteria? Maybe public speaking class.
The Devaluation of Oratory in Democracy
President Joe Biden could not have given a speech more diametrically opposed in rhetorical power and quality to President Zelenskyy this week. Biden’s State of the Union will be historically remembered as a mix of tepid and strange, like re-using a tea bag in hot water drawn from the tap.
The State of the Union speech is not required by the United States constitution. Here’s the section that is relevant:
Article 2, Section 3:
He [The President] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information on the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.
This was done in writing for most of the history of the United States. It was Woodrow Wilson who first started to use it politically, as something to get attention back on the President and Presidency for political gain. Since then, it’s become a tradition, one that I think we might consider doing away with.
Biden’s speech was harmful to the importance of rhetoric. Specifically, it reinforced a definition of rhetoric as inert, inactive, exclusive, expository, and descriptive (opposed in this case to constitutive) of the world.
After the refreshing power of public address demonstrated recently by Zelenskyy, who should be on everyone’s mind – The Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Nations, the Kenyan Ambassador, and others come to mind – Biden’s speech seems tone-deaf to where we are in terms of public address. When speech becomes obligation we are doomed as a democracy. This is what Biden’s speech represented: An indicator to go look at other indicators. Directions on where to go. No attempt to invite any kind of conversation, interpretation, or thought. The State of the Union should be more than that, although yes I do realize that most of the time they are not very good.
It’s time to eliminate the State of the Union, or demand something better from our President.
Here are some issues and concerns I had with the speech:
No cadence or fluidity: There didn’t seem to be any indication that President Biden was interested in holding for applause, letting his words sink in, or letting the attending audience participate in the creation of the meaning of his speech. It’s a nice powerful bit of visual seriousness and support when the President waits for members of Congress to express through cheering their support of an idea – or at least indicate their will toward an issue that was brought up.
The Absence of the Rhetorical Use of Silence and Acclimation: When applause tried to occur, Biden just powered through the applause. He didn’t wait. It was very awkward, and really detracted from any sort of powerful moment he wanted to convey. He didn’t seem to care, or be aware, that these moments work very well when played back on clips in the national media. There’s no circulation here. Like a first-year university student in a public speaking course, he couldn’t wait to get to the end.
Expository not Argumentative: The speech never built up anything. It was like a school report. Here’s this number, that one. No indication of how we are supposed to think about it, but more vitally: No indication as to how we should feel. Even moments where he was trying to get us to move thoughtfully or emotionally came off flat, such as “We’re all going to be OK.” The way this was delivered and offered conveyed a feeling of worry to me, as I’m sure it did to many people.
A Flat Consistent Tone: There were a few moments where Biden’s tone of voice should have shifted to offer proof through conveying feeling, which Aristotle called pathos. The speech was like a bad pop song, mixed to the maximum levels of the recording with no quiet spots and no loud ones. A pivotal moment might have been to switch from a defiant, powerful tone when discussing Putin and Ukraine to something more somber when discussing the losses Americans faced across the board during the pandemic. There were many moments to shift tone to indicate the feeling, or the part of the narrative that America was in, and how we were overcoming those moments. All lost on Biden, who was giving a school report.
No place for us: We were told who we are, what we think, what we feel, and what we believe. There were zero constitutive moments here for us to think, feel, or imagine who we are or who we could be. We were told things were bad, and getting better. We were told that investment is increasing. We were not invited to invest. We were simply told how things are.
Rhetoric’s primary power is that of imagination and the creation of possibility in the minds of the audience. We can take this in a number of directions, but for the purposes of this essay, let’s limit it to the idea of feeling immersed in something. Biden could have, through tone, delivery, and making a space for us to think and consider things – provide our own views along side his – immersed us in an America that faces and faced unprecedented threats but is seeing it through. We could have been right there, seeing the dawn, participating through our thoughts in feelings in the change. But instead of this dip in the ocean of potential, Biden showed us the rhetorical equivalent of a home video of a tropical fish tank. Here it is; accept it as it is. If you want to see more, go there and look at it yourself.
This kind of poverty of rhetoric impacts democracy by taking the primary instrument of democracy – the oration, the sharing of ideas through speech – and rendering it into an obligatory ceremony of listing supposed facts. The most vital part of democracy is the ability to share perspective, but not as fact – as invitation to imagine something otherwise. Any nationally televised speech by a chief executive to the assembled members of congress should not just be political ritual, but a model or an ideal of sorts as to how to use our words to reach others. Stop listing accomplishments; start crafting possibility. Give the people something to hold and make their own, something to build their own ideas off of in their communities and families. Biden didn’t just give a bad or confusing speech; he actively harmed the role of oratory in a supposedly democratic system.