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.

Strategy

The word is frequently used by Presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

He has been chastised in the media for using the word as a red herring--to detract from the real problem of ignorance which lies within himself. He knows little about the world and about current geopolitical realities. But to avoid exposing his state of blank-slatedness in these matters, he uses the word "strategy" forcefully.

Last night Romney couldn't say anything concrete about foreign policy issues, but said he had a "strategy" for global affairs. At one point he said he had a "strategy" for not only solving the problems in the Middle-East, but also in the whole world.

So, he has a "strategy" for the world?

What does that mean?

Nothing.

The word was made famous by George Bush Jr, except that he said "stragety". The action that ensued from the Bush regime is invasion and war.

Regardless of whether a politician uses the word "strategy" or a Bushism version of it, I believe the word itself is an empty, and permit me to say this--a hoax word.

It's a managerial word that implies nothing but a deferral of action, or a form of action that is monolithic and gets botched easily because it doesn't take into account the messy changeability of real situations. Real situations continually evolve and take up different direction at varying points in space and time. No "strategy" can manage and control this.

We could campaign for bidding adieu to "strategy".