Following this weekend’s tragedy in Arizona, almost every mainstream media and blog outlet began weighing in over the direction of America’s current political discourse — and most pressingly, the inflammatory rhetoric and symbolism behind Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement. The criticisms leveled against the Palinites varied, but the developing consensus seemed to be that there was some blame to be dished out. Right-wing America has spent the last few years developing a discourse that uses a rhetoric of division and violence, the argument goes, so it shouldn’t be surprising when that rhetoric moves out of the realm of thought and into the realm of action.
We know now, of course, that the shooter that attempted to take Gabrielle Giffords’ life, Jared Lee Loughner, wasn’t a hardline political ideologue for the right or the left; he was a troubled young man trying to navigate a variety of fringe political and social ideologies. Palin believes this absolves her of any guilt, but this is largely because she — like so many of the political figures engaging in this type of discourse — have no idea how rhetoric works. This lack of knowledge is what allowed Rebecca Mansour, one of Palin’s aides, to remark, “I don’t understand how anybody can be held responsible for somebody who is completely mentally unstable like this.”
It is for you then, Ms. Mansour — and for everyone else who engages in communication of a linguistic nature, including your boss — that The Nervous Acid Guide to Responsible Public Speaking for Dummies was composed.
Lesson 1: There is No Such Thing as a “Neutral” Word.
I’m pretty sure that if you asked any number of public officials to define the word “discourse,” the majority of them would assert that the word is a synonym for “discussion” — and this is, to some extent, true. But the “discussion” inherent in the root of this word does not refer to the simple back-and-forth banter between, say, a conservative and a liberal. It’s actually not a literal discussion between any two people at all. A discourse is, rather, a language that interacts with history and context; it is rapidly changing, and largely in dialogue with itself. Since every good Dummy Guide should refer to at least one of those intellectual elitist experts, we’ll toss the ball to the literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin for this one:
As a result of the work done by all these stratifying forces in language, there are not “neutral” words and forms — words and forms that can belong to “no one”; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents … All words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life, all words and forms are populated by intentions.
What this means is that words — and, in fact, symbols — cannot survive apart from their context, and perhaps more importantly, that words and symbols are already rife with ideological meaning before they are used. That meaning once again changes with each successive use. Only a few years ago, “reload” was the name of Metallica album; after this weekend, the word has been populated with a much different sociopolitical intent. Bakhtin expressed this principle with a simple idea: All language, he says, is ideological.
Discourse — or, what one person says to whom and when they say it — plays a central role in the tradition of rhetoric. Palin and Mansour may have only started paying attention to the political discourse when Reagan was in office, but the identification of potential problems associated with their guileless use of language — and an explanation for how someone can be “held responsible” for their words and imagery — were actually traced out by the Greek epic poet Homer.
Lesson 2: What’s Greece Got To Do With It?
It could be that Palin and Mansour skipped all those Greek classicism courses in college because the Hellenic ideal of male love kind of freaked them out. You never know! Whatever the case, it may have served them well to pay more attention to the work of Homer, who — in addition to composing classics like the Odyssey and the Iliad — actually cracked a pretty important code in the mechanics of discourse and the potency of language.
According to Homer, there are three functions of discourse. Because this is a Dummy Guide, we’ll give you the elitist word for each role, followed by a good old fashioned Joe-the-Plumber definition:
- Language is heuristic: All this means is that discourse functions as a means of discovery. We observe and listen and figure out how we want to say something. So if I see my big brother cry while pleading for a toy and it works, I make a note of it and add it to my bag of tricks.
- Language is eristic: Think about the first time you heard Jay-Z’s “The Takeover.” What is it about that line — “So yeah I sampled your voice, you was using it wrong / You made it a hot line, I made it a hot song” — that was so captivating, effective, and totally humiliating? This is the eristic function at work.
- Language is protreptic: Listen up, Glenn Beck! While rhetoric uses all three functions of discourse, the protreptic purpose is the one that gets people hurt. James A. Herrick, a super smart elitist at one of those fancy colleges that the Tea Party seem to loathe, explained this function so clearly that even a dummy could understand: “Language affords human agents the possibility for persuading others to think as they think, to act as they wish them to act.” Italics, interestingly enough, are his.
This brings us to our final lesson, which integrates everything we’ve learned so far.
Lesson 3: “Fire!”
Whenever we talk about issues of free speech, the go-to example for its limits always goes back to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. The fact that we need to add context to this word — that we are yelling, that we are in a crowded theater — lends credibility to Bakhtin’s idea that, on its own, the word “fire” is neutral.
The conventional wisdom is, of course, that if one yells “Fire!” in a crowded theater, the showgoers will panic and begin a riotous move towards the exits — ostensibly causing stampeding, injuries, and even death. So let’s change the context: What kind of reaction would you get if you screamed “Fire!” in a room full of firefighters? What kind of reaction would you get if you screamed “Fire!” in a room full of burn victims? What kind of reaction would you get if you screamed “Fire!” in a room full of pyromaniacs? For each person listening, that same one-syllable word is populated with completely different meaning — it is imbued with duty to the firefighter, anguish to the burn victim, and pleasure to the pyromaniac. Anyone who isn’t completely deluded can understand this.
Which is why Mansour and Palin are being so intellectually dishonest when they claim that they “can’t understand how anybody can be held responsible.” In the last year alone, we’ve seen right-wing candidates for public office speak about “Second Amendment remedies” as if armed militias were an acceptable, if not inevitable solution to an ideological debate. We’ve seen graphics with crosshairs and Twitter rhetoric — Twhetoric? — written in gun-owner lingo. We’ve seen Republicans and Tea Partiers come armed to political rallies.
The fact is that right-wing propagandists are well aware that context is everything, and they know their audience well. If Barney Frank told someone to “reload” on Twitter, for example, it would probably land with a bizarre sense of irony. But when Palin uses this kind of rhetoric, the discourse operates under a completely different set of conditions — because a solid number of her constituents are gun-owners, because a solid number of her constituents have romanticized the violent militias of America’s past and have (under her guidance) conflated our modern debates with the extreme struggles of a new country, and because Palin herself shows up on reality television killing animals with a fucking rifle.
She is screaming “Fire!” in a room full of pyromaniacs and she knows it.
So whether or not the Tea Party rhetoric had a direct effect on Loughner isn’t the point. The point is that responsible public speaking means that we are responsible for the messages we send — and if we are going to engage in rhetoric, we should at least have the slightest understanding of how language operates. Meaning that if conservatives have the right to scrutinize Ice-T for the violence tenuously linked to “Cop Killer,” then surely Sarah Palin’s own brand of entertainment-politics must stand up to the same kind of scrutiny. Her insincere attempts to deflect such criticism are symptomatic of an unchecked sense of entitlement and white privilege. But they say nothing about her intellectual innocence.
