Ferguson, Missouri and Leaving Academia

This is a piece that has waited nearly two years to be written, and even as I write it, I partially regret it, but it feels prophetic--a voice in the wilderness that needs to be heard.

 I'm a police officer. I'm also a teacher. I've had a foot in each of these identities my entire adult life. I wanted to teach at a university from the time I first arrived at university (before that, I wanted to teach high school). But after a year working as a professional actor, I decided that I did not want to teach theatre and that I would need a "real job" if I wanted to re-tool in graduate school. So I took the only other job I had ever wanted to do, and I became a police officer in the same medium-large city as my father. While I worked as an officer full time at night, I also earned a Master of Arts degree in English, worked two years toward a PhD in English Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy, and taught either as an adjunct or a graduate student for eight years. Two years ago, I took on more responsibility on my police department (and, full disclosure, a requisite increase in pay) and stepped away from the PhD, uncertain as to whether or not I would finish it, but certain that I would continue teaching. This August, the third academic year in which I have not taught will begin, and I will still not be teaching. What happened? Ferguson, Missouri.

A couple months after I stepped away from my PhD program, Michael Brown was shot and killed by Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson. A version of events told by his friend held that Brown had been trying to surrender to Wilson, holding his hands in the air, when Officer Wilson murdered him in cold blood. This was aired in a television interview and immediately became the official version of events in the national media.

Around the same time, a hispanic man in a neighboring jurisdiction died after a video-taped confrontation with police, in which no weapons were involved. Two years later, two more high profile cases have again brought the issues that these incidents laid bare back into the public conversation. At the time I was asked often by friends, people at church, and my academy colleagues what I thought about these cases. I would say simply that I wasn't there; I'm not part of the investigation, and so it would be inappropriate and irresponsible for me to give an opinion at that time.

This is an attitude that, in large part, I held as an important academic habit. In fact, I saw this as an ethic that academics hold dear. My own discipline of Composition and Rhetoric preaches a thorough and sober approach to evidence. We have even coined a term for this: "negative capability," or a rhetor's ability to withhold judgement until she has examined all the evidence, weighed it against other evidence and context, questioned assumptions, biases, and motives of those providing the evidence and indeed the rhetor himself, and taken time to consider what all these mean.

Yet what I saw among many of my academic friends and colleagues was very much the opposite. It is not surprising to me that my colleagues would hold particular views on race and its role in structures like policing. After all, many academics in the humanities, myself included, hold fairly progressive ideas with respect to social issues. My own research involved the ways in which elements of the built environment act as signifiers of inclusion/exclusion (in other words, how the way we build stuff, the signs we post etc. are read by people to they belong in a place or whether they don't). What did surprise me was their extraordinary rush to believe and act on a version of events from a spurious source given long before any other evidence was even available. Incidentally, in the two years since Ferguson, I have read both DOJ investigations (Darren Wilson and the Ferguson Police Department were investigated separately), and I am convinced that 1) Wilson was legally justified in shooting Brown and that 2) the people of Ferguson were absolutely reasonable in believing Brown's friend instead of "their" horribly malfunctioning police department. I do not extend this priviledge to professional academics whose job it is to wait for, then carefully weigh evidence (two years later, this is the first time I've given a public opinion on the incident).

I saw from my colleagues in academe countless critiques against the police, accusations that American police are racist and violent, part of abhorrent system of control, out of control themselves, and so on. I saw none of the things I had come to expect of my own field of Rhetoric. I saw no discussion of the mediators involved in video evidence--the role of camera angle, the role of the videographer and her decisions about when to start and stop filming, of what to include in the frame and exclude out of it, the role of the news editor in determining where to cut the video and whether or not to include sound, and whose commentary will be included, whether that commentary will come before or after the video, etc. I saw no attempt to interrogate the market system at play in media coverage of the event-- no question as to whether or not wealthy white owners of cable news networks may have something to gain through editorial choices that posit middle class, white police officers as murderers of poor black youths. Instead, I saw shouting in university courtyards, vicious name-calling, rushes to judgement, and a complete lack of respect for actual evidence. Certainly, as is the case in examining any community, it would not be fair to lump all academics into one box. There were people, usually close friends, who would ask me about my perspective as a police officer and had tremendous respect for whatever insights I had (evasive and tentative as they often were). There were probably many others whose prudence kept them out of the public conversation all together and so I never knew about them. But I didn't see them, not even to urge calm and deliberation, which is what I always felt we were supposed to do.

After the in-custody death in our neighboring jurisdiction, while the investigation was still on-going, a community literacy center with whom I had worked for several months held a writing workshop for the family and friends of the subject (I don't mind calling him victim) to write about what the experience was like for them. On the same day that my former colleagues were posting pictures of themselves with smiling members of the victim's family, we were assigning officers to sit on the home of one of the involved officers who lived in our jurisdiction, because he was receiving death threats serious enough that we deemed it necessary to post a guard on his house, something that usually only happens in the movies. That officer was, supposedly, under an open investigation and thus enjoyed, supposedly, the legal presumption of innocence. I am not aware that any writing workshop was ever considered for the officer, his coworkers, or his family (maybe there was and I never knew, but  I would have been the natural person to contact to facilitate it, so I feel safe in assuming there was none). No one ever gave him the opportunity to write about what it was like to go from being afraid he was going to die, to being afraid he was going to be prosecuted, to being afraid he was going to die again. No one gave his wife and children an opportunity to write about what it was like to have their father vilified in the public forum--to hear that he should go to prison forever, that he should be killed. No one asked them to describe what it's like not to be allowed to go outside to play because there have been threats against your family. There was no attempt by my colleagues at the writing center, that I know of, to understand a fuller picture of those effected, or even acknowledge, despite having worked with me for months, that there was one. Instead, that officer, a husband, father, and public servant, was relegated to the position of robot-police machine, inhuman and inhumane instrument of a racist and evil system, that which all right-minded, socially progressive academics must stand against, then publish research about.

I had always seen my field as a last vestige of hope in a society that rewards rushing to the extremes (take, for instance, the people we've chosen as our presidential nominees). As teachers in universities, we were perhaps American society's last best hope to finally learn slow and respectful discourse on important topics--topics that involve the lives of police officers and of minorities, topics which deserve serious and deliberative discourse. Yet the speech and activities of my colleagues after Ferguson made me question if we had ever actually believed any of the things we had been teaching our students all along. Maybe we never actually meant it.

Policing is very imperfect. If not carefully managed, it can have dehumanizing effects, both on officers and the people with whom they interact. Officers, if they are not careful, can easily develop very myopic views of the the world, views which they fully believe are the only "real" world that only they are in a position to see. Police officers can fall prey easily to black and white views of their communities: us and them, good people and bad people, criminals and victims, and yes, even sometimes, black and white. These tendencies must be examined and we have the obligation to determine what role these tendencies play in incidents like those in Ferguson (and these similar incidents since), and what we can do about them. But the profession of policing is dominated by people who truly believe in and orient their professional lives toward service. As problematic as this type of dualistic thinking can be, police officers overwhelmingly believe that good people need to be protected from bad people, and that this mission is worth risking our own lives. This is evident in the personal and professional sacrifices police officers make every day.

My wife and children are without me every night that I work, so that my wife and I have slept in the same bed at the same time less than half the days we've been married. I am 37 years old and I have arthritis in my right hip, where my gun presses into my side. I know what it's like to be bitten by a human and spend the next year having routine blood tests for blood borne pathogens. I know what human brain matter looks like on a popcorn ceiling. I know what it's like to tell an African American man, a father like me, that his 17 year old daughter was killed by a stray bullet at a New Year's party, while at the same time a 30 year old Syracuse PhD candidate is publishing a paper claiming that I can't empathize with that man because I don't live in his neighborhood (a real paper, by the way, given at CCCC, 2014).

We keep doing it despite these sacrifices and despite the inherent danger not because we were picked on in high school and we want to get back at the world, or because we want to subjugate minorities and trap them in their lower class neighborhoods, or because we just like the power trip, or any of the other things we are accused of every day. We do it because we believe in it. Imperfect as we are, we believe deeply in the perfection of our cause.

I'm left to wonder now what we, as academics believe. How did our reaction to Ferguson and similar incidents seem to betray the habits that I thought we most valued, the ethics that drew me to the field in the first place. Perhaps I am being too critical of academe. Perhaps it is well-meaning enough. Maybe we already knew what we believed, and so we thought we must speak out quickly because the value of human life trumps the academic, theoretical value of "negative capability." Maybe we made the very human error of failing to question our own biases when reacting to Ferguson, even as we teach students to carefully examine their own. Maybe we have such firm beliefs about systems in general that we failed to examine the particulars of these individual cases, instead prematurely assuming that the individual case was simply one more example of the problem of the system as a whole. Maybe we still hold our academic values firmly, we just forgot them a little in the heat of the very important moment.

But as any recently disillusioned person, I can't help but see something more insidious. Maybe, when Ferguson happened, what we saw was a bandwagon. Aboard that bandwagon we saw ready-made kairotic research questions, publishing opportunities, entryways for our literacy centers into communities usually reluctant to trust egg-heads with clipboards. Maybe it was nothing more than  careerism, and completely unreflective exploitation of my life as an officer and the lives of the minorities in the communities I serve.

I love the university. I love teaching, and I miss it often. And I hesitated to write these words for nearly two years because I wish to reserve the right to change my mind, but at the moment I cannot see myself returning to the classroom. Ferguson, Missouri forced me to confront these two roles I play: as an academic and as a police officer. I'm not the kind of person who feels an obligation to "choose sides." I am deeply suspicious of anything that feels like "us versus them," but my experiences watching, talking to, arguing with these two separate communities in which I'm wholly a member has forced me to confront what I believe.

I believe that, despite deep imperfections, perhaps even tragic ones, in American policing, the men and women I serve alongside do it because we believe in what we're trying to do. We hold these beliefs strongly enough to risk our lives for them.

As an academic, I'm not entirely sure we actually believe anything.

Oklahoma Meteorology and Digital Culture Debates

In Oklahoma, weather is big business. In the Spring, when the risk of severe weather is the highest, it is not unusual to spend a Saturday night on the sofa eating Ben and Jerry's and watching wall-to-wall weather coverage. Weather coverage has spawned its own television entertainment culture in the Oklahoma City market. Everyone here knows about the Mike Morgan Severe Weather Tie (which has its own Facebook page), and the Gary England Drinking Game. Storm chasers like Reed Timmer, Val Castor, Alan Broerse (the spelling of whose name I did not have to look up) are household names. Meteorologists are bonafide celebrities, consistently the first T.V. personalities in our market to earn verified twitter status. Weather coverage is, therefore, incredibly competitive. This means that it is often very dramatic.

The competitive and dramatic nature of weather forecasting in Oklahoma, combined with the serendipitous co-occurance of the busiest time for severe weather and Spring sweeps means that local T.V. networks are vying for viewership through use of high drama, employing scored of spotters, helicopters (one station brags that it has two helicopters chasing storms), and well-equiped weather centers. Locals, therefore, often accuse T.V. meteorologists of overdramatizing the weather in order to gain ratings. These accusations range from the everyday as any prediction that doesn't come true becomes evidence that meteorologists were "over-hyping" all along to much more serious suggestions that meteorologists' overdramatized warnings have caused deaths. Because of this, it has become fashionable for jaded Okies to distrust the local network affiliates for their weather coverage (though we still find ourselves glued to the television every time it "feels" a certain way outside).

Of course, such distrust is not new. Just as concerns about "liberal media agendas"and the like led to the explosion of alternative media such as talk radio, blogs, social media, and so on, so too have these concerns led some to search for their weather coverage from alternative sources. (I myself prefer to stick to the National Weather Service's predictions when I start to sniff sensationalized weather forecasts.)

Into this mix came meteorologist Aaron Tuttle, a controversial and even divisive figure in Oklahoma City media. Tuttle is a former KOCO-TV meteorologist who "decided to retire" from television in 2007 to work as a meteorologist for the FAA. He is a celebrated, vilified, and parodied figure who runs a website, appears in auto dealership ads, and posts mirror selfies of his abdominal muscles. According to his social media sites, he still "works for the federal government," but he also charges $200 per appearance to speak in public and offers a "free" web app for which he accepts donations. He has a large following in OKC, mainly, it seems, because of distrust in local media, and his own critiques of local media for their sensational broadcasts.

It's ironic, then, that he stepped into serious controversy when he made this prediction on May 17th.

As I write this at the end of the date in question, I look out at clear skies and the setting sun. Obviously, it's not unusual for meteorologists to get it wrong. It happens so often, it is a cliche (not to mention, a Nicholas Cage movie). But this forecast was different for a couple of reasons. One was simply that it was SO wrong. Every other forecaster in the market, including the National Weather Service forecasted a 20% chance of a few scattered thunderstorms, some of which could become "marginally severe." Indeed, a few popped up in Eastern Oklahoma in the early afternoon, then fizzled out as it cooled and they lost energy. There was never, according to any other meteorologist, any tornado threat.  Apparently, when Tuttle made his forecast, he failed to account for a very obvious factor (something about low level moisture maybe?) that stabilized the atmosphere to the point that tornados where simply not a concern. It was an oversight so obvious to people who know what they're doing that meteorologists across the country questioned Tuttle's motives for making the prediction.

Even early in the day, before we could know for sure whether or not Tuttle was right or wrong, meteorologists were trying to fix the damage his forecast was causing as panicky Oklahomans shared, retweeted, and generally freaked out about his dire suggestion that tornados of the "EF4/5 kind"were possible. Early in the day, according to the alternative media website "The Lost Ogle," Emily Sutton was challenging his forecast on social media. Marc Weinberg, an OU trained meteorologist in Kentucky went so far as to suggest that Tuttle should be held accountable, comparing his irresponsible forecast to yelling "fire" in a  crowded theatre. The forecast was apparently so obviously flawed that even a Meteorology undergrad studying at OU implored his twitter followers not to trust Aaron Tuttle.

For these forecasters, Tuttle's forecast could only be explained by one other interesting feature if the above post. It is this phrase: "Link to donate to keep free." Aaron Tuttle, a meteorologist whose only public exposure is now through social media (he is called an "internet meteorologist" by his T.V. competitors) has nearly 94,000 Facebook followers. That number has jumped by more than 6,000 in the past two days, as followers shared his post out of concern for a tornado outbreak akin to the Moore Tornadoes of May 3,1999 and May 20, 2013.

My interest in this incident is that it is an interesting example of debate between established forms of media and new media forms. Here is a clear, everyday example of the debate between what is referred to in the study of rhetoric as Bookspace/Cyberspace, or Web 1.0/Web 2.0. Cynthia Selfe discusses this debate as being between people who think of "technology as bane" and those who think of "technology as boon."

The proliferation of alternative media forms has been made possible in large part by the "technology as boon" mindset of much of contemporary culture. Technology, especially Web 2.0, has often been credited with democratizing knowledge. Those who are suspicious of "bookspace"
see old forms of media as propping up old systems where knowledge was reserved for the few and powerful. They see old media as inherently biased, carefully crafting facts to support particular ideologies, or to pander to advertisers and editors.

Yet, interestingly, people who are so suspicious of these old media forms seem to often accept New Media as somehow value neutral, as if those engaged in New Media have no biases, ideologies, or motivations other than complete truth. We are often quick to accept that those engaged in digital or other forms of alternative rhetoric are benevolent revolutionaries, trying to make their prophetic voices heard against an oppressive establishment.

But this controversy should remind us that this is not necesarily true. Rhetoric in any form is never value neutral. We can never accept it uncritically. Here, in fact, we see a definite strength of established, old media. At KOCO, if Tuttle is this irresponsible, he is out of a job (which makes one wonder how truly voluntary his "retirement" was). After all, old media, with all its problems, has a reputation to maintain. There is a system of checks and balances in place to, at the very least, see that incorrect predictions are just wrong because sometimes you get it wring and not because person making the prediction was wholly irresponsible. After all,  when it was discovered that Jayson Blair had plagiarized and fabricated stories in the New York Times, it was a huge controversy, and it tarnished the reputation of one of the most established and revered media establishments in the world.  When it happens on some right wing blog (like, daily), no one bats an eye. Yet we continually distrust these established forms and accept uncritically new forms, much the same way we challenge our doctors with things we read on WebMD.

If we are to learn media literacy in the Digital Age, we must learn to have at least as much healthy skepticism for New Media forms as we had for the old forms when we started seeking out alternative sources. We must learn to question why Aaron Tuttle would make such predictions and in the same paragraph ask for donations. We must learn to ask why he is not working in television anymore in a market where good meteorologists stand to make a lot of money. We must learn not to so quickly accept that he "retired" because he was tired of fame (which seems to be the suggestion he makes in this explanation). We must ask what his motives are before we share his Facebook posts or buy his weather ap. Or rather, offer it for free with a donation.

Erasure of Race, and Other Things That Don't Help

My friend (and former research subject) Crystal posted a post this morning by Jen Yamato at Deadline.com about the minor scandal at the USA Today when they used the headline “Holiday Nearly Beat Thor as Race-Themed Films Soar" to lead a story about the success of The Best Man Holiday. Certainly, there is plenty to criticize in the insidiously reductive phrase "race-themed," a phrase that suggests that the movie is actually about race. This was a no doubt unintentional but nevertheless troubling gaffe, to be sure. There is something slightly unseemly about suggesting a genre that is Black Film. Yet, I find Yamato's response troubling as well.

Yamato acknowledges that "mainstream media seems to have trouble characterizing a film like this," then she offers the suggestion that "maybe the simplest route is to call it a Romantic Comedy." Certainly, this route is simple. It has the benefit of refusing to characterize the film based only on the race of its characters. This allows us to avoid any suggestion that we might be racist, since we don't even bring race up.

This follows a typical post-race approach of trying to simply pretend that race does't exist. To do this, we must also ignore a defining characteristic of the film, since surely the choice to cast all African American characters was purposeful. To pretend that this is not the case is to disallow  discussion about these artistic and political choices.

One of the salient features of films like this one is that they place African Americans is positions of economic privilege. Thus, they write African Americans into subject positions generally dominated by whites in both film and society at large. In this film, and others like it (suggesting that perhaps there is indeed an emerging genre here), African American characters are the center of the action, rather than at the periphery. Furthermore, they are characterized as wealthy, educated, well connected, and highly nuanced. Again, all subject positions typically thought of as white.

These films, therefore, create a really interesting counter-history, one that deserves serious critical attention. This hypothetical counter-history allows us to question why such portrayals are so rare in our plays and films and, more importantly, why they are so rare in society. They allow us to ask why these films seem so out of the ordinary that gaffes like the one made by USA Today are even possible. For, indeed, what is so strange about these films is that they don't portray African Americans in the way films generally have in US culture: as poor, or downtrodden, or as gang members--in other words, why they are allowed to be just like white people.

Such questions should trouble our thinking about American film art, and the modern myth that we are post-race at all. Of course, such questions are not possible if we pretend that race does not exist, if we commit an erasure by failing to note exactly what it is that makes these films so unique. While it may be inappropriate to to evaluate these films on race alone, since indeed there are other plot elements and genre conventions at work, it is also inappropriate to refuse to address it. Criticizing the USA Today for myopically referring to these films as "race-themed," does not mean that we should ignore that race is indeed one of the themes. Doing so only ensures that we continue to pretend that race is no longer a contested subject in need to sustained critical reflection. Such erasures are, therefore, just as injurious as what Yamato set out to criticize.

Nike Celebrates [Under?]Achievement

We all know what sneaker commercials are like. A freakishly talented celebrity super human performs amazing feats of strength or skill, usually against either a minimalist silence or against an expensively produced, raucous rock song.  Time will likely be slowed so that we can appreciate the agility and poise of our Superman, as flash bulbs momentarily silhouette his amazing physique. Then, in close up, we see his shoes. And on the shoes, the swoosh, or the swish, or the basket pattern, or some other form of highly recognizable iconography. And maybe we're supposed to think, "it's gotta be the shoes that make him fly." Or maybe we're just supposed to see that he's wearing these shoes, so they must be the best.

We all know this commercial, because it's every commercial. Through these ads, companies exploit our own wish to be great by showing us those who truly are and then drawing connections between that greatness and their product. NIKE has been a master of these type of ads at least since the introduction of their Air Jordan line in 1985. A prescient example of this style is this early commercial for the Air Jordan I.

In this example, we see all the genre conventions that have come to typify sneaker ads (Spike Lee's internal rhymes and Looney Tunes character cameos have, thankfully, fallen out of favor). We see His Air-ness on an outdoor court, alone of course, like a tragic Greek hero. The soundtrack is silent, save for the sound of a jet engine, throttling up before take off. As the pitch of the engine rises, so too does Jordan, flying through the air in slow motion, assuming the pose that became the apparel line's universally recognizable logo. Finally, as he slams the ball through the hoop, we hear a thunderous echo, and we hear Jordan ask, "who says man was not meant to fly?"

The ad hardly talks about the product at all. We don't hear anything about how light the shoes are, how springy the heels, how solid the ankle support. Instead, we are shown only the very epitome of greatness, followed by the simple statement "Air Jordan. . ." NIKE sees no need to sell us the product based on its merits. They needed only to connect the shoe to Jordan's greatness (a connection Jordan was all too happy to help make. He was fined $5000 every time he wore the shoes in a game because they did not fit uniform standards. If he's willing to pay so much money to wear the shoes, they must be good.)

Because this strategy is so well known to us all, and because it is so tried and true, NIKE's 2011 "Find Your Greatness" campaign might be a bit of a surprise. This is because the "greatness" the ads in this campaign celebrate are nothing like the greatness that we would associate with a Michael Jordan (or even his counterfeit copy, LeBron James). The "Jogger" ad, which might have been the most memorable ad of the campaign, provides a good example of NIKE's much different kind of greatness.

This ad shares a few noticeable things with it's 26 year old predecessor. It's remarkably silent; we hear nothing but the sound of crickets at dusk and the crescendo of footfalls on asphalt. It features a human being in solitude. This seems to be the mark of discipline. The characters in these commercials are still out working, alone in their determination, while others have gone in.

And yet, there is one profound difference in these ads. As he gets closer to the camera, it's clear that the lonely character in the "Jogger" ad is not Michael Jordan, the world class athlete--the best to ever play his sport.  Rather, he is a morbidly obese fourteen year old from London, Ohio named Nathan. He runs awkwardly and sweats profusely, but he's catching up to the camera, which is also moving along the deserted road. And, as he runs, a voice proclaims that ". . .greatness is no more unique to us than breathing. We're all capable of it. All of us."

The brilliance of the ad is that it celebrates the un-athletic, the un-talented, the banal. What's more, it calls it "greatness." So, these ads present NIKE apparel, not as the apparel of the elite, winning championships and MVP trophies, but as the apparel of the kid, winning a battle against himself and against his own body. Greatness in these ads isn't the super-human talents of the superstar. Greatness is a kid having the courage to change the direction of his life, against all odds and against the doubt of others. This, perhaps ironically, makes the ad very powerful, because it celebrates the Everyman. It speaks to the consumer that doesn't want to be a superstar, but instead wants to be healthier, wants to live without being ashamed, wants a date to prom, and it says, "we've got the apparel to support that, to support whatever 'greatness' means to you."

Electoral Maps and Visual Rhetoric

Maps were very important Tuesday night. A ubiquitous feature of network coverage of elections is the large digital map, coded with the now definitive red and blue. As networks reported races and results, they invariably used touch screen maps to zoom in on states to look at county by county results. As the evening started shaping up, analysts used maps to explain scenarios that would get each candidate to the magical 270. So, as important as maps have become in these discussions, it is smart to examine these maps. They are, despite seeming to be object graphs of voter behavior, discursive in nature, and thus worthy of analysis.

The rhetorical nature of these maps is evident in the fact that, in the morning after the election, my Facebook news feed was full of this map:

This map seems to be an objective graph of how each county voted. Surely, there's no way to spin this map; it simply is what it is. Yet, it's not surprising that this map was being shared by my Republican friends, rather than my Democrat friends. The attractiveness of this map to my Republican friends is simple to explain: it contains a lot of red. The implicit argument, then, is that a huge section of this country is conservative, or at least Republican, and last night's results are a product of those slightly-less-American coasts. I had one friend even make the comment that "ninety percent of the country is red." But of course, square miles don't get to vote: people do. In this way, this map, as a graphic representation of the electorate, is a bit misleading.

Here is a different picture of the country:

This Rorschach Test looking map is a map of the United States, distorted to account for population. It is a county map, like the one above, except that the sized of the counties is adjusted so that they reflect population rather than land area. The colors on this map reflect the election results, by county, of the 2004 election (here is the county map from 2004. It looks nearly identical to 2012). This map is topical rather than topological.

On this map, the red isn't near so overwhelming. And, obviously, the blue is much more prominent. As one of my students said of this map, "this map is a lot more magenta." The highly divided nature of the country is much more evident in this map, and it is easy to see that the population centers of the country  are solidly blue.

The point here is that no piece of information, even a seemingly objective map, is devoid of rhetorical construction. The way that a map as a graphic representation is constructed, presented, and passed around must be interpreted. These two maps contain different assumptions about the information they present, and thus imply different arguments about the political picture of the United States. Understanding these may greatly inform our understanding of the nature of the electorate and last night's results.

Here's one more, just for fun. What are the [barely] implicit arguments imbedded in this graphic?

Gotye and Digital [Pop] Culture

This post is intended to argue that the Gotye mash up above is evidence of Gotye's understanding of the mindset of digital culture. But instead of jumping right in, I intent to enter the conversation through the back door, in order to provide some theoretical background to what I am going to argue about Gotye's piece.

A couple years ago, Steven Hopkins, a graduate school colleague of mine wrote and presented a paper for a graduate seminar in which he presented the Gregory Brothers as an example of web 2.0 success (I hope I don't mis-state his argument. If I do, I look for him to correct me in the comments section). The Gregory Brothers, a musical group made up of a set of brothers and one of their wives, are now known for Autotune the News, the Obama Kick Ass Song, and of course the Bed Intruder Song (a phenomenon that I've addressed in the past).

Understanding the Gregory Brothers' success relies on two concepts important to theorists of digital culture and literacy. The first is Alexander Reid's concept of Rip/Mix/Burn. Reid cites Lawrence Lessig as the originator of the idea, which states basically that participatory digital culture relies on the ability of participants to rip material from other sources, and to combine these artifacts until a new artifact is produced through these combinations. Reid argues that this is, in fact, how cognition works. If this is the case, all cultural artifacts (whether art, discourse, or any other intellectual endeavor) are culminations of the artifacts, attitudes, ethics, and tropes that influenced them. This understanding, to Reid, problemitizes our understanding of issues like copyright, since nothing can truly be the product of one author/artist. All intellectual work is communal.

In the digital era, this process of Rip/Mix/Burn is exemplified in artifacts like fanzines, YouTube mash ups, and so on.  This is, of course, what the Gregory Brothers do on their websites. In order to make their videos, they bring together news clips, soundbites, and images and set these to music. So, they start with other people's copyrighted material, mix it up, add their own creativity, and produce something new.

The second important concept in understanding Web 2.0 success is Michele Knobel and Colin Lanksheare's idea of a Web 2.0 "mindset." For Lanksheare and Knobel, print culture was built around a "scarcity model." Hemingway was valuable because there was only one of him, and his success relied on his having been signed by Scribner. In order to become a successful writer, one must do so through the professional mediator of a publishing house. If one was to become a successful musician, one must be signed to a record deal. In this mindset, value came from an artifact's rarity, and the dissemination of that artifact was carefully controlled by professionals who supposedly knew what was good, and what would sell.

Web 2.0, on the other hand, functions according to a proliferation model. One becomes successful in digital culture by "going viral." And this relies, not on the professional wisdom of publishers and recording studios, but on the mouse clicks of viewers who like what they see and hit the share button. The Gregory Brothers, a band, became popular not when they were noticed by a studio for their "original" pieces, but when they were noticed by Internet users for their mash ups. Culture, according to Lanksheare and Knobel is shifting in such a way that this mindset will become dominant.

The entertainment industry proper, however, has been reticent to the changes this second mindset calls for. The entertainment industry, and the music industry in particular, has in fact, engaged in open warfare with the second mindset through  anti-piracy movements and PSAs, and law makers have responded with bills like the SOPA. The recording industry, including many musicians, has often militantly protected copyright. In this way, the industry has been rather retrograde with respect to its response to digital culture.

Because of this,I was a bit surprised and also pleased with this video by the recording artist Gotye. To produce this video, Gotye (who signs the video with the shortened form of his given name "Wally") trudged through the numerous parodies and covers of his song "Somebody that I Used to Know" that had been posted on YouTube and pieced together a new rendition of the song using these clips. Rather than circling the legal wagons and going after all of these video makers for copyright violation, he has instead himself ripped these samples, mixed them, and produced something from them. He has helped write his own fanzine.

This suggests that Gotye has adopted what Lanksheare and Knobel call the "second mindset." He hasn't just allowed the remixing of his song, but has in fact participated in the remixing process himself. In this way, he shares authorship with his audience, in much the same way as a blogger does when he enables the commenting function on a blog, then responds to commenters. He's allowed his sing to become an artistic wiki. Furthermore, he acknowledges that the form of the remix was ityself "inspired" by [ripped from] a Kutiman YouTube video. He also provides a link list to all the "original videos" of the "Somebody" covers he has used, and admits (in a tone that looks like apology) that he could not include all of the covers  he found.

What Gotye seems to understand is what the rest of the industry seems to have missed with regard to the new mindset: that the parodies and samples of his song did not harm him by violating his copyright. Rather, they brought attention to the song and they added to the conversation about its value. He seems to understand that art is a communal process, in which artists (and consumers) inspire and react to one another. The image of a solitary genius is a myth. Authorship is always shared. And the result of this shared authorship, in this case, is a haunting and aesthetically beautiful piece in its own right.

Looks Like Mad: Imagery and Mediation

Last week, at a training class for public officials I attended, someone brought a newspaper which had a montage of four pictures (like the one above) of James Holmes, the accused gunman in the Aurora, CO movie theater massacre. Holmes's appearance in court had been the conversation du jour for the twenty-four hours or so before. The descriptions from the media of these images and video clips included words like "strange," "detached," "bizarre," and so on. These reports seemed to lead inevitably to speculation about whether or not these images suggested that Holmes was mentally insane or if he was, perhaps, acting in order to prepare for an insanity defense.

During a break in our class, one of my fellow attendees showed me the front page, pointed out the photos, and said something like, "look at him. Do you think he's crazy?" Always one for pedantry, I said "well, I think that the editors of this paper were able to choose four photos that made him look crazy." I then added, "I think these photos say more about how the editors wish for us to see Holmes than they do about Holmes himself." I don't intend to argue about whether or not Holmes is mentally ill (to tell you the truth, I don't watch the news much and don't have any interest in engaging in those kinds of discussions anyway), but rather I want to use the conversation to discuss the reliance on  imagery as evidence, and to interrogate it a bit.

What's interesting to me about the discussion in my training class, and with similar discussions in the media, is that we (viewers/discussants) were being asked to decide whether or not Holmes was mentally ill based on the evidence of how he "looks" in photos selected for us by editors, rather than on the immensely anti-social nature of the crimes of which he's accused. Our impressions about the way he "looks" seems to carry more rhetorical weight with regard to the question of his sanity than does his actual behavior.In a way, we were being asked whether or not the way he looks might serve to explain, or even excuse the way he actually behaved.

For me, this is a testament to the power of visual evidence on our culture. We readily assume that visual evidence, in the form of photographs and especially in the form of video, is an unimpeachable and unmediated form of proof. After all, if we can see something, we can assess it's truth ourselves. If one wanted to prove a particular person broke into a store, for instance, a copy of the surveillance tape settles is. We know the actions of police in the Rodney King assault were abusive because we saw the assault on tape. And with the proliferation of cameras in modern public space in the forms of camcorders, media crews, police car dash cams, traffic light cameras, surveillance cameras, and cell phones, we have been acculturated  into the understanding that anything can be recorded, and recordings tell us the truth. Seeing is, as we say, believing.

We, therefore, tend to accept visual proof of any concept, event, or phenomenon as unmediated truth. Thus, we fail to interrogate visual imagery in any significant way (except maybe to argue about whether or not an image was staged or Photoshopped). We must learn to be careful, though, when considering visual evidence, just as we would be with any other kind of evidence. We must learn to ask who recorded this image. What was their purpose in doing so; what did they include and what might they have left out; how was it edited and why was it edited this way; what is the context of this image? These kinds of questions help us to determine just what a visual image is actually evidence of. They allow us to determine how much of the truth a visual image actually shows us. It is not enough simply accept that, because we see an image, we are privy to the whole truth of any situation.

One of the readers I have used to teach composition contains an interview by textbook authors David Rosenwasser, and Jill Stephen with photographer Joseph Elliott. In this interview, Elliott makes reference to a distinction he makes between artistic photographers as "Stagers and Recorders." Recorders, like Andreas Gursky, attempt to capture reality as they see it in front of them. Their photographs are somewhat journalistic--one might say "slice of life." Stagers, such as Gregory Crewdson on the other hand, well, stage their photographs. They plan them ahead, set lighting, build sets, use posing actors, and so on.

Stagers, according to Elliott, see themselves as "more honest" than Recorders because they are willing to show their hand in their photographs. Elliott explains, "any photographer is clearly implicated by the process of taking photographs." He goes on to say, "a photographer is inevitably selecting what to shoot and thus what not to shoot, and he or she is always framing the shot in various ways." In other words, the photographer necessarily acts as a mediator between the subject and the viewer, simply by choosing what to photograph. For instance, in the examples I've provided in the hyperlinks above, Crewdson's photographs are obviously staged in order to capture his artistic vision. But even Gursky, a Recorder, has framed the photo in order to capture a certain geometry, chosen a time of day that best suited the lighting he wished to capture, chose from some number of prints that which best fit his aesthetic sense of composition, and so on. So, though his photo may provide a "slice of life," it is necessarily a carefully chosen slice.

This concept has application when considering non-artistic images (those which we may use as evidence) as well. A newspaper photographer, a crime scene detective, or a cell phone user photographing a police officer on a traffic stop all, like an photographer/artist, chooses what to photograph, and by necessary extension, what not to photograph. There is always something going on in the margins, outside the frame. The photographer is always deciding that this is the thing he wants to photograph, and this is when. Even the most objective photographer is choosing what to photograph and when to snap the shutter, and in this way mediates the "truth" that the image captures.

This holds true of video as well. This is an important point because we give video an even greater evidentiary weight than we do still images. After all, videos are real time. If I want to test whether or not the photo editor who put together the four photos of James Holmes had fairly represented his demeanor for the whole of his court appearance, I might watch watch the video of the entire proceeding.

But in video, as in still photos, mediation occurs simply in the act of pointing the camera alone. Then, the act of editing the video adds another very important level of mediation. For instance, look at the effect editing had on the video below.

This is a very chilling example of the ways in which editors of video can more or less create truth that may or may not fairly represent the "reality" that the camera filmed. Of course, most camera operators and editors are not so unfair as the editor of this video, but the process of mediation remains the same even when editors truly wish to present images fairly. She still must edit a video based on what she believes is important, based on how she interprets the event.

Even an unedited video is subject to the limitations of framing, camera angle, video quality and so on. For instance, the cameras from a police dash cam might lead to an entirely different understanding of an event when viewed from one camera angle than when viewed from another. What if you were asked to decide whether or not the shooting filmed in these hyperlinks was justified based on the first video alone? You would believe you had seen the event as it really unfolded. After all, you saw it happen--from the officers own camera. The first video seems to clearly show officers shooting a man who was simply walking away. But of course, when you watch the second video, the limitation of the first becomes clear.

It is, therefore, important when judging the value of an image to ask why this photographer took this particular image at this particular time and in this particular way. Was this taken by a journalist who wishes to sell copies? An advocate of some particular cause hoping to make a certain emotional impression? Might this photographer have left something out, and if so, what and to what effect? What context might we be missing when viewing the images alone?

By positing these questions, I don't mean to turn readers into conspiracy theorists, assuming that photographers are trying to trick us. The point is that all photographers, videographers, and editors must make decisions about what the viewer will see and how they will see it, simply by the limited nature of what they are able to show. Furthermore, the choices choices are rhetorical. They take specific images, at specific times, and for specific reasons. An image is not an unmediated and inherently subjective window into truth, but rather a limited and controlled argument. Visual images are certainly very powerful pieces of evidence, but they must be treated as what they are--pieces.

Remember this next time you're presented with an image that is said to be indisputable truth of something.

Being Really Useful: A (sort-of) tongue-in-cheek analysis of the Thomas and Friends series

As a father of twin sons, I have been subjected to hours upon hours of Thomas and Friends episodes. My sons also have Thomas the Tank Engine models (two of which actually propel themselves and pull wooden train cars), and Thomas blankets. In fact, my wife discovered a potty training breakthrough for our son Beckett by buying him Thomas underwear. She explained to him, "Thomas is our friend. We don't pee on our friends." After this, Beckett, who is innately logical, tried very hard not to wet his pants and, when he had an accident, he would sulk and say "we don't pee on our friends."

Their Thomas craze has subsided some in favor of Veggie Tales and Elmo, but during the height of their Thomas fandom, when we were watching the show constantly, I would make fun of the oft repeated phrase "really useful engine," a phrase repeated ad nauseam in the Thomas and Friends series. I, somewhat jokingly, insisted that the show was designed to brain-wash children into accepting the ethos of being "really useful" as sacrosanct. Of course, I made these assertions in jest, mostly because there is nothing so particularly insidious about teaching children to be useful.

Then, yesterday, I was picking up the horrifying mess my boys hourly make when I came across their "Thomas & His Friends Help Out" DVD. While I walked the DVD back to the living room (I found it in the bathroom, of course), I haphazardly read the back of the sleeve. The description of the stories contains a quote ascribed to the railway director, Sir Topham Hatt: "Helping out is one of the best ways to show that you're a Really Useful Engine." I instantly noticed the divine capitalization used in the phrase Really Useful Engine. This capitalization, usually reserved in modern English for proper nouns and pronouns for the deity, suggests that the ethos of being Really Useful is, in a very interesting way, treated as sacred within the context of these stories. Since this is the case, I thought, perhaps this ethic deserves a little attention. What does is mean to be Really Useful? What makes this ethos culturally appropriate, and what cultural systems does it privilege?

It may be tempting to think it silly to analyze a children's television program, that it is, on it's face, an over analysis, a pedantic intellectual exercise. I admit that this is true. I am, in fact, writing this blog mostly in jest. But, I would also argue that our children's television shows are indeed worthy of scholarly analysis. This is because, considering how much time our children spend watching television, educational and otherwise, it's reasonable to argue that these shows are one of the important activities through which we enculturate our children. In a way that probably ought to make us uncomfortable, it makes perfect sense that the nation that produced the ghastly Struwwelpeter stories also produced the Holocaust (see Katz, Steven B. "The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust." College English 54.3. 1992). This is because a society's cultural productions, especially those considered didactic, inculcate its members into the society's organization, ethics, and systems. So, what ethics and what systems are being privileged when we teach our children that it's important to be "Really Useful Engines?"

First of all, understand that within the context of the Thomas the Tank Engine TV shows (I confess, I haven't looked at the books, so I cannot speak for them), the goal of every character is to be regarded as "Really Useful," especially by Sir Topham Hatt, the Director of the Railroad. It is indeed, their only form of payment. The phrase "Really Useful" appears in nearly every episode and is, in fact, part of the theme song of the show. An engine becomes Really Useful in the ways one might expect: by being on-time, by working hard, and by performing well at difficult, work-centered tasks.

This is a decidedly industrial ethic. Work hard, and you shall be regarded as Really Useful. And, of course, to be called Really Useful is the ultimate compliment in these stories. Thomas and Friends, then, privileges an ethos that is undoubtedly industrial rather than, say, one that is relational. In the quote I gave from Topham Hatt earlier in this post, the reader may notice that one "help[s] out" (relational) in order to show that we are "Really Useful" (industrial). This quote, which succinctly provides the moral of these stories, seems to privilege the industrial over the relational. We do the work of relationship (helping out) in order to become industrious (really useful). The relational serves the purposes of the industrial, rather than the other way around.

This seems to fit well with cultural ethic of the industrialized west, specifically the UK and the US where these shows are produced. In many eastern cultures (especially middle-eastern), which are more relational, one might expect an inversion of this moral. One tries to be "really useful" (industrious) in order to "help out" (foster relationships and cohesion). In the west, we tend to privilege industriousness in an extraordinary way. We place great personal value on industrial value. That is to say, we often judge others by their ability to contribute through work. We introduce ourselves to strangers by telling them what we "do," which always means what we do to make money. Indeed, a good puritan work ethic is part of the fabric of our society, a society that counts on its members' ability and willingness to work. Industriousness is an important ethic with regard to the the maintenance of the military-industrial complex, which is, after all, the core of a capitalist society.

What we learn from this (which will not really be a surprise) is that we begin inculcating cultural values at a very early age,a and through seemingly innocuous, even wholesome, media. As an individualistic, capitalist society, we teach our children from a very early age the importance of individual achievement and industriousness. We want them to want to be Really Useful, because our society requires useful members--that is, members who do good work. If these lessons aren't exactly purposeful (I abjure the thought that Reverend Awdry was purposefully brainwashing children into good little corporate slaves) it is only because these ethics are so naturalized that these lessons happen automatically any time we write something we believe to be educational. These lessons just seem seem right and good in and of themselves. The ethics they teach are, for better or worse, sacrosanct.

I hope you've found this analysis Really Useful. Even better if you're a publisher who finds it industrious.

Because I'm (sort of) a Rhetorician Who Was Once a Music Major

Several weeks ago, this digital poster made the rounds especially among my artsy, hipster friends. Of course, graduate school ruined me so that I can't look at anything without performing a miniature Toulmin analysis, so I quickly analyzed this poster, questioned it's assumptions, and filed it away in my brain to deal with it later. Well, it's later. I won't do a line by line Toulmin analysis here, because it wouldn't be particularly interesting, but I will address the implicit argument of this digital poster and the assumptions on which such an argument relies.

The argument itself is relatively straight forward. The poster first shows lyrics from the song "The Way You Look Tonight" which, if the adjacent photo denotes authorship, it mistakenly attributes to Frank Sinatra (the song was written by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields and originally performed by Fred Astaire for the 1936 film Swing Time. Sinatra recorded a version in 1964, by which time the song was considered a standard.) Underneath these lyrics, the poster lists the much less interesting, highly reductive (dare I say, stupid) lyrics of Justin Bieber's "Baby." Underneath these lyrics, in the popular style of the (de)motivational poster, is the line, "Music, w..what HAPPENED!?"

The argument here is easy to discern. Music (judged by lyrics) was at one time rich, complex, and good. Now, it's simplistic, stupid, and bad.

This claim presents as its grounds the lyrics of these two songs. Of course, this is a digital poster, so it has little time for a nuanced portrayal of the music of these two eras (either the 30s or the 60s depending on if the poster intends the actual song, or the Sinatra remake, and the early 21st century). A complete historical picture of these two eras obviously cannot fit onto a digital poster. The claim of this poster, then, relies on the assumption that each of these songs is representative of its era. The quality of each era can, therefore, be judged based on the quality of each of these songs.

This assumption is relatively easy to attack. After all, it relies on the related assumption that ridiculous lyrics, like those of the Bieber song, did not appear in songs of the earlier era. Such a claim disregards lyrics like these from the Johnny Mercer song "I'm an Old Cowhand" (also remade by Sinatra):

I know all the songs that the cowboys know
'bout the big corral where the dogies go
'cause I learned them all on the rad-ee-o
Hey, yippie-yi-yo-ki-yay
Yippie-yi-yo-ki-yay

Furthermore, this assumption suggests that our current era does not include lyrics of more sophistication that the Bieber song, thus discounting lyrics like those of Anna Nalick:

Cause you can't jump the track, we're like cars on a cable
Life's like an hourglass glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button, girl
So cradle your head in your hands

In other words, in order to support the claim of this poster, the author relies on a biased sample, a logical fallacy in which the arguer makes generalizations which cannot be supported by the evidence provided because they are purposefully biased.

Furthermore, claims like the one made by this digital poster tend to discount one very important aspect of history--that is, history will ultimately remember the things that were the best of the era. Every church in the Baroque era large enough to hire one had a church composer and organist. But they didn't all become Johann Sebastian Bach. Indeed, an extraordinary majority of them, though they may have been popular at the time, have been forgotten by history. We remember Bach because he was the best of the era. The same has been true of the music of the 1930s and will be true of current music as well. It is, therefore, inappropriate to compare the relatively banal lyrics of one particular Justin Bieber song to the songs that have survived because they held some quality that made them classic, and use this comparison as evidence of some kind of devolution of music.

Claims like the one made in this poster ultimately belong to the narrative of the "golden age." Such narratives are often presented for rhetorical reasons by folks who wish to show that their own generation had it right and that "kids these days" have it all wrong, or by people who wish to show that they are aware that things used be be better and that their awareness of this fact makes them more sophisticated than others of their own generation. In other words, there is an element of pop-culture elitism inherent in these arguments. To the careful observer, however, these arguments do not show the sophistication of the arguer, but rather, the arguers historical ignorance, or at the very least, the arguers abuse of rhetorical strategy.

Parenting 2.0

In case you haven't seen it, the video above was posted on February 8th by an angry father in an attempt to discipline his daughter for posting a nasty "letter" to her parents on Facebook on and his video has quickly gone viral. A dozen or so of my friends have shared it on facebook, it's been blogged half to death, and it even appeared on my MSN home page for much of the day. It features a father reading the ranting letter of his daughter's (which she thought she had blocked from her family and church), then shooting the laptop computer the family owns for her to use.

As the video has gone viral, many have congratulated this father for punishing an ungrateful child, while others have been vocally angry about his public punishment. I choose, here, to theorize about the situation, and what it means to parent in the digital age (and in digital format).

Though most (well, all) of my friends who have shared this video were congratulatory toward this father and his innovative punishment, I was initially worried. The very public nature of this punishment worried me (*though, to disclaim, I'll say: keep reading.). I have serious concerns about the highly public nature of this father's punishment.

When young people post videos about each other, we classify it as cyber-bullying. We know that one of the aspects of cyber-bullying that makes it so dangerous is its highly public nature. Information placed on the internet can spread very quickly, and the written/recorded nature of this information gives it an appearance of permanence. And though, realistically, what is said about or to another person on the internet may be quickly lost in the fast-paced, instantaneous flow of information on the web, for an adolescent, it feels as though everyone has seen it and it will never go away.

For these reasons, I have grave concerns over the appropriateness of this father disciplining his daughter in such a public way. As adolescents, we all said things and behaved in ways that we would later realize were immature. In fact, the things that she says in her letter are exactly the things many of us were in trouble for saying when we were adolescents. And, looking back, we are embarrassed by our own behavior. In this case, this daughter's embarrassing mistakes were made incredibly public. Millions of people she does not know are calling her ungrateful, citing her as an example of what's wrong with "kids these days" and congratulating her father for disciplining her.

Of course, embarrassment can be a powerful disciplinary tool. My dad used to tell us a story about how his father punished him when he was caught shoplifting by shaving his head. He hated it, and his girlfriend, who loved his longish flowing hair, broke up with him over it. Of course, we have all seen the pictures of kids whose parents make them hold signs proclaiming themselves as shoplifters. My favorite is of a kid who "wants to go to prison to be with daddy."

In fact, in a response to people questioning why he would punish his daughter so publicly, the father said that he was raised this way:

If I did something embarrassing to my parents in public (such as a grocery store) I got my tail tore up right there in front of God and everyone, right there in the store.

The difference, though, is that these describe very local forms of embarrassment. Most of the people who saw my dad's hair cut knew him. In this case, this daughter's punishment is on display to millions. For millions she has become an example of a typical, ungrateful teenager. The folks sharing links to this video, arguing about it in comments sections and on blogs (like this one. . .) do not know this girl--they do not know her other weaknesses or her strengths. Instead, she is a dehumanized and disembodied "example" of what's wrong with this generation.

Of course, to disclaim this entire conversation, she is reportedly good-natured about the whole situation. Her father was surprised that the video went viral (he expected only her facebook friends to see it) and, when it did, he had to talk with her about the attention it had received and what they should expect now. According to her father, they have read many of the responses to the video, laughing at the predictions that she would "commit suicide, commit a gun-related crime, become a drug addict, drop out of school, get pregnant on purpose, and become a stripper because she’s too emotionally damaged now to be a productive member of society." Her surprisingly good attitude probably says less about the validity or invalidity of this form of punishment than it does about the relationship between this man and his daughter.

So, a case like this one ought to cause us to begin to theorize what it means to parent in the digital age. Since digital environments have become as important in our lives as physical environments, the policing of rules of etiquette, social norms, and appropriate behavior is also important. This means that parenting will happen in, or at least regarding, these environments. So how do we do this? There has been a great deal of conversation about what we must teach our children about the internet, but little thought about what and whether we teach them on the internet. Where are the lines of appropriate behavior when it comes to parenting and interacting with our children in digital spaces? Is the digital world a place that offers us new innovative ways to parent, or just another dimension in which to screw them up?

Brecht, Alienation, Reality TV

I wrote my first non-realistic play my senior year of college. The play was decidedly (in retrospect at least) a closet drama. The play contained all the things I loved about absurdist drama: blatant Marxism, Brechtian alienation, and so on. That is to say, it was way too European for American audiences.

When I got to graduate school and began looking closer at American and English non-realistic plays by writers like Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, and so on, I realized that these writers had not been able to do what continental European writers like Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov, Weiss, and other had considered crucial. They had been unable to banish subtext.

European Absurdists accepted Brecht's notion that an audience could never fully be convinced by characters in a play. They could never be convinced that the characters had cross motives, sexual desires, inner conflict, because they could never be convinced that the people they saw on stage were characters at all. The fact that they were spectators in a theatre would always break any illusion that an audience might have that these actors were real people or that their conflicts, problems, and relationships were genuine. Coleridge's notion of "willing suspension of disbelief," then, is in fact impossible. The space alone precludes it.

Since this is the case, according to Brecht, the theatre must find a means outside of emotion to
communicate with an audience. For Brecht, this means was via the intellect, through what he called the "Epic theatre." He wrote

The essential point of the epic theatre is that it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectator's reason. Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things.

The theatre, then, is didactic. It "must not believe that one can identify oneself with our world by empathy, nor must it want this." Instead, the theatre should ask the audience to think. In order to accomplish this, Brecht espoused a technique (or class of techniques) knows as "alienation." A play, rather than trying to bring the audience in, should continually remind an audience that it is apart from the action, that it is not invited into the world of the play, that there is, in fact, not a world of the play at all, but only actors on a stage reciting lines.

So, as I thought of Brecht's desire that the theatre should be didactic--that it should cause an audience to think about things--I wondered how the theatre might carry this out without the European burden of alienating the audience. American audiences expect to be emotionally involved and want to be drawn in, even if this is not fully possible. How does the American theatre accomplish Brecht's goals (a theatre that forces an audience to consider) when it cannot accept his methods?

I then thought of the ABC television show "What Would You Do." In this reality show, which combines the "happening" of the 1960's with Chris Hanson style investigative journalism, actors in public settings act out shocking scenarios in order to record the reactions of unwitting spectators. The idea is to conduct a social experiment investigating whether or not people will react ethically. "What Would You Do" represents an anti-Brechtian form of didactic theatre. That is, it attempts to perform a didactic role by asking the audience to consider how and whether they would act in these shocking situations. Yet it does so not by alienating the audience so that it is reminded that the spectacle isn't real, but by convincing the audience that the scene is real. In order to do so, it blurs the lines between the traditional theatrical relationships of actor, audience, and space.

Actor and Audience:
In "What Would You Do" the shocking situations that make up the dramatic conflict are scripted and performed by professional actors. And, obviously, the viewing audience represents a very traditional passive audience. But the show blurs the line between actor and audience by staging its scenes in public places full of unwitting people who just happen to be in the right place at the right time. By filming these people's reactions to events that they do not know are scripted, and by enticing them into action, the show turns audience members into actors.

Also, when these people do react and intercede into the scenes, they then take agency from the professional actors who had up until then been performing roles. These actors then, albeit briefly, become audience members. They must watch and listen to the intercessors in order to respond appropriately and continue the action, which has become improvised. Thus, the show subverts the roles of actor and audience, though both roles do still clearly exist.

Space:
The use of space in these performances is the most important reason these ruses work. What makes the willing suspension of disbelief ultimately impossible in traditional theatre is the space itself. An audience member at a traditional play can't help but to know he's in a theatre. After all, he has bought a ticket, he has probably dressed up, driven to the theatre, taken his wife out to eat before the show, read the program, sat down when the lights dimmed. And throughout the action of the play, he sits in an area lit very differently than the space the actors occupy, likely in a row of chairs physically separated from the actors. The space, then, is alienating in and of itself.

In "What Would You Do?" on the other hand, the space the audience member enters is a public place, likely one she frequents. The space is not the Orpheum Theatre, but rather it is the restaurant that she would have gone to on the way to the theatre. She has no ticket and no program. She sits among the actors and in fact cannot know which are actors and which are other audience members like herself. She does not even know she's in a theatrical space.

Un-Alienation
This use of space then allows the spectator to be convinced that what they are seeing is, in fact, real. There is no physical reminder that the actors are reciting a memorized script, thus the audience member can fully empathize with the actor, whom they regard as a real person. This use of space, then, un-alienates (admittedly, a clumsy term) the spectator by bringing him within the same physical space as the actor. They share the stage.

The show also brings the audience member into the play in a very literal way. The entire purpose of the script it to build and build the action until some audience member reacts and intrudes into the scene. The show thus un-alienates the spectator by making him an actual part of the play. Of course, the beauty is that the spectator does not know he has become an actor in a play. Instead, he is convinced that his actions and the actions of the professional actors are real. He has unwillingly suspended his disbelief.

In this way the audience member has, through the theatrical event, been forced not only to think about what she would do, but she has been put to the test. She has had to either act or refuse to act. Similarly, the viewing audience has been able to empathize with the duped unwitting accidental actor because he could just as easily be tricked the next time he is on the subway or at a bar. He, therefore, must think about what he would have done if this shocking scene had presented itself to him.

The show then is didactic and theatrical and it is so without alienating, but in fact by un-alienating, the audience. It has then done what Brecht asked the theatre to do (caused the audience to think about things) while maintaining the aesthetic demands of an American audience to be "moved."

The Hands-in-Pocket Revolution

Last night, Charissa and I sent our boys off to their grandparents' for the weekend, so we spent a night on the town. We went downtown for chocolates and coffee then decided to take a stroll to see the OKC National Memorial because Charissa had never seen it at night. On the way, we were surprised to see a large group of people in a downtown park, which is usually home to a number of homeless. But this looked like a rally. Complete with a News 9 van. So seeing some Bricktown police officers I know, we went and asked what was going on.

Turns out, the Occupy Wall Street movement had come to Oklahoma City. So, in front of me were a group of well meaning revolutionaries wanting to voice their concern that the wealth of this country was in the hands of a very small percentage of the population.

This is a obviously not a new complaint, and it's a concern that I should be careful to note here that I share. I think it's appropriate to ask whether or not a democracy where so much power is held by so few can be a democracy at all. When small groups of people hold the money, and therefore the power to make their voices heard, the rest must either agree with them or be silenced. This is obviously a huge problem in a democracy, and one that I think is a political reality in our country. I think it's fair to ask if our democracy isn't something more like an oligarchy.

I also sympathize with the complaint that wealth is not spread more equitably. So few have so much, while so many have so little. This is and always has been a reality in our world. But the problem seems somehow more insidious in a country in which hard work is supposed to be the key to success, where our own national mythos holds that if one simply works as hard as one can, one can and will rise. Of course, for many, this is simply untrue. For the uneducated, the poor, the handicapped, and many others is positions of disadvantage, it is awfully hard in this country to rise much above one's stature no matter how hard one works. After all, if you go from being a fry cook to a shift leader, you haven't really gone so far after all. This is a sad and awful reality. One that compromises our democratic ideals. One that, perhaps, calls for revolution.

But what I saw in the park last night was not a revolution. It was not revolutionary. It was not even in touch with the real problem. The fact is, the whole "I am the 99%" line is a sham. I did not see the poor, the stricken, the underprivileged, the oppressed. I saw no minorities (though I did see one African American woman on the News 9 story), and in an interesting irony, I saw not one homeless person in a park where homeless people sleep every night. What I did see were a lot of upper-middle-class white people, many college students (one even carrying a sign with an OU logo printed on it), wearing interesting and expensive body art and piercings, taking pictures of each other with smart phones, and all-in-all having a jolly time.

Obviously, there's nothing wrong with upper-middle-class white people noticing and speaking out about social inequities (I am, after all, all of these things). But as I listened to their speeches and watched their interviews, I became more and more aware that the people I was listening to didn't have a clue, and in fact had no compulsion to enact anything like the kind of social revolution that would change this country.

I found that I wanted to get up and speak myself (I didn't). I wanted to ask for a show of hands in answer to these questions: How many of you know what is at 800 W. California? What about 1335 W. Sheridan? How may of you have ever been to SW 8th and Rockwood? SW 15th and Westwood? NE 28th and Kelley?

These addresses describe the City Rescue Mission and the Jesus House. SW 8th and Rockwood is an intersection less than a mile from the opulence of the new Devon Building. The street at this intersection and for a few blocks on either side of it is in such disrepair that it is not even paved. Meanwhile the city that says it doesn't have money in the budget to fix the street is re-doing the Myriad Gardens--the front yard of the Devon building. These other intersections are the locations of large public housing projects in the inner city.

Then I wanted to ask them how many of them had been to Bricktown? To a Thunder game? To an OU-Texas party?

What I saw last night was not a collection of people dedicated to bringing about change. Instead, I saw a collection of college students who wanted to take part in something and leftovers from the 60's wanting to relive their own college years. Occupy OKC may as well have been a flash mob.

For those of us in the upper middle class, real change must begin with our admission that we are not victims in some class struggle between millionaires and thousandaires. We are suspects. We are people who demand to be heard but who blithely ignore the problems of people much less fortunate than ourselves--people who really are oppressed and poverty stricken. We complain that our student loan rates are unfair considering our sorry job prospects while we ignore the man working six days a week sweeping the street up after our protests. We don't even know that when we're sleeping in after a Saturday full of college football games and fun nights in the Paseo, he'll be getting up at 4:00 and walking to Labor Ready so he can be in line before all the good jobs are gone. We don't know about. We don't care about him. Yet we demand that something be done about him.

So, my complaint in this blog is against pretend revolutionaries. My exhortation, though, is for real ones--would be revolutionaries who don't know what to do. It's as simple as this:

Do Something!

Realize that standing in a park under the Sandridge building hoping Tom Ward will throw some money down does nothing to change the status quo. Get out of the park and into the community. I've often half-joked that I want a revolution led by Jesus Christ and Kurt Vonnegut. That's because these men both realized that change happens by getting among people and helping, eating with them, hearing their problems, being a voice for them. And doing these things (as Paulo Freire has suggested) not as patronizing liberators but as neighbors.

Sure, both these men took to the streets as protesters (Jesus was after all killed for the things he said), but they both understood that this in not where the real work is done. The real work is done by being kind to people. By living among them.

You want to see wealth redistributed? Start with your own. Feed and clothe people, even if it costs you your smart phone. Care for the sick, even if it costs you a semester or two of college. Go into foreign countries or even poor neighborhoods in your own country, even if you're uncomfortable. Use the privilege of your education to understand and voice the concerns of people who need an advocate. Put down your sign and pick up your shovel.