Ivie Essay
Submitted by Ed Appel on Tue, 2005-08-02 09:00
Robert L. Ivie's essay, The Rhetoric of Bush's War on Evil, is surely the best thing I've read on the discourse and persuasive strategies of our 43rd president. There are so many trenchant observations in this critique, it will take several short posts to do justice to them. Needless to say, it is a hard-hitting polemic against, as well as warning about, Bush's brand of snake oil. Nevertheless, Ivie's analysis is subtle and balanced, careful to point out sharp distinctions between, as well as frightening similarities to, Hitler's <em>Mein Kampf</em>, the benchmark piece of propaganda from which the author takes his Burkean inspiration.
Let me first split hairs with Ivie on two possible points of contention. Early on, he likens Bush's rhetoric to that of Hitler in the sense that the global scapegoating of the international Islamic terrorist as the cause of, or as the chief explanation for, America's economic ills, namely, its gargantuan deficits, is similar to that of Hitler's scapegoating of the intenational Jew as the cause of all of Germany's financial problems following the Great War. Bush's sleight-of-hand thus deceptively substitutes a noneconomic explanation for one that could realistically account for an economic ill. Ivie could have been a bit more nuanced here by noting that in Hitler's case, the scapegoat as cause was made out of whole cloth. In Bush's case, yes, the president is being grossly disingenuous, but the war on terror has contributed some to America's threatening financial crisis. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the recession and 9/11 combined do account for about one-third of the 2004 deficit (Paul Krugman, Checking the Facts in Advance, New York Times, October 12, 2004). Bush has been riding this pony for more than a year now, quite mendaciously, but not altogether so.
The other minor point I'd make is, rhetorical tragedy, unlike aesthetic tragedy, fosters an attitude of rejection every bit as much as it functions as a frame of acceptance, as Ivie offers. Burke's theory of tragedy in Attitudes Towards History works well for theatrical and literary art, the main focus of his chapter on Poetic Categories. It does not fit one-to-one, however, with the rhetorical situation. I refer you to my article on the rhetoric of William F. Buckley, Jr., in the Western Journal of Communication, Summer, 1996, pp. 279-80
These are, though, mere quibbles. I'll get to the quite potent gravamen of Ivie's case in my next post.
Comments
The structure of sacrifice in the tragic drama of Bush's war on evil is somewhat anomalous, isn't it? As Ivie has rightly noted, the perfected scapegoat is front and center, the international Islamic Terrorist. These terrorists are responsible for most of our growing budget deficit. They are the cause of our problems with pacification in Iraq. They reside within in locations like up-state New York. They're presumptively charging across our borders in droves to the south and north, prompting alarm about our immigration policies among the paleo-conservatives, at least. They concoct plans in Germany, set off bombs in Spain and Bali, and foment riots and unrest in Indonesia and the Philippines. And they are simply 'evil, motivated against us not by anything we have done by way of foreign policy, only by hatred of our freedom. (Susan Sontag, one of Burke's students, was savaged by the Right for her response to 9/11 in The New Yorker. She offered actual reasons for what the terrorists did. That offense was cited in her recent obituaries.) Ubiquitous and expressive, as Ivie describes it, of some dark force in man, woman, and the universe, they pose an all-embracing threat to our survival in the 21st Century.
Yet, we, the vulnerable citizenry of this embattled land, are asked to do almost nothing in the way of self-sacrifice in the face of this global threat. Intense motification of a kind customarily accompanies profound victimage. That's the logic of a tragic drama. Self-denial in support of the common cause is dramatically implicit in a call to a difficult and long-term effort to destroy a cunning and globally aggressive foe. One of FDR's reasons for hawking war bonds in the 1940s was, reportedly, to enhance Americans' sense of sacrificial participation in the global conflict---to say nothing of rationing, drives of many kinds, women in the workplace, frozen rents and prices, and a diminution of partisan politics. Bush asks for nothing except ever-steeper tax cuts, especially for those with high-incomes; an all-volunteer army, no draftees; and a continuation of free trade initiatives that transfer more and more of our industrial base, some of it of military significance, abroad. Only a few of our civil liberties are to be relinquished in our war on terrorism.
Doesn't this dramatic inconsistency expose the phoniness at core of Bush's war on terror?