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
I'm wondering whether Ivie hasn't offered an even more compelling example of the distortion of religion and the religious motive for persuasive purposes than Burke's. Burke's critique of Hitler's book-length rant named Mein Kampf has always seemed to me to be built on something of an ellipsis, a soritical argument with a few important blanks in it not fully filled in until The Rhetoric of Religion was published in 1961. It wasn't until he published his Religion book that Burke finally got around to fully explicating the theological motive of perfection and its pervasive appearance in whole or in attenuated part in so much secular as well as sacred discourse. True, on occasion Hitler did invoke the name of God in his fulminations before taking office and seizing plenary power in 1933. A speech Hitler made at the Burgerbraukeller in Munich circa April 12, 1922, is a case in point.
Hitler was not, though, or anything close to it, an overtly religious orator. He did not present himself as a man of God in the Bushian mold, nor did he directly play upon religious sensibilities the way W does. As Ivie makes clear near the end of his piece, with admirable nuance, Hitler presented himself, unlike Bush, as something of a god, not as a man of God. Hitler's distortion of religion was in the thoroughly tragic form his oratory took: He described a perfect, let's even say perfectly potent, agent (himself), performing a perfect act (thoroughly vanquishing and eliminating a perfect enemy responsible for all of Germany's ills, to say nothing of this adversary's universally destructive nature dating back as far as the Fall of Rome), for a perfect cause (the establishment of a thousand-year Reich that would be the envy of the world, if not its master, a veritable heaven on earth), by way of a perfect agency (a united citizenry composed of head and hand striving together obediently and self-sacrificially for the good of the Fatherland), within a perfectly dire scene in which chaos and ruin were at the doorstep. It is this perfectly tragic drama, in its formal features, that so insidiously mimics the Divine perfections of the Christian story.
Burke does not explicitly make these connections in his critical article, first published in the Southern Review. Hitler used the religious form, particularly the Western religious form, to work his rhetorical magic. George W. Bush employs religion in both form and content to mesmerize America and bring to fruition the radically conservative revolution the Weyrich's, Buckleys, and Falwells have long sought.
More later.