Rhetorical analysis

Part of my job in the classroom is to teach something called "rhetorical analysis."

Simply put, it's a task where the reader gets busy tearing apart an argument she doesn't like. It's the underlying ideology that is torn asunder, however the ideology is so enmeshed with the rhetoric that to get to one, it's important to start with the other.

Stanley Fish shows us how to do a rhetorical analyses of everything, ranging from a political speech, to Sarah Palin's "rogue" memoirs to the rhetoric of the Hunger Games, in his NYT "Opinionator" column.

But I find Fish's analyses to be a bit esoteric, so when I came upon Matt Taibbi's take on David Brooks' "boiler-plate jihad" against the Gay-marriage lobby's recent appeal to the Supreme Court to make a decision on legalizing same-sex, I jumped at it as a good example of rhetorical analysis.

I think Taibbi is particularly brilliant in getting to the heart of the matter in Brooks' rant against the need to legalize same-sex marriage. It's that Brooks' sees marriage as a "constraining" institution, which entails the loss of certain fundamental freedoms that individuals enjoy. He redefines marriage giving it a bit of a narrow scope. I've read opinion upon opinion meted out by this most dourest of conservatives on how marriage is not simply an officializing of a bond between two people who want to spend the rest of their lives together, but also some kind of an "institution" that requires the individual to compromise on unfettered individualism and settle for shared sacrifices. Brooks' does reduce marriage into a non-romantic ideal whose most important function--that's it, a "function" that makes marriage sound mechanistic--is to shore up communal living.