[KB] "Trivial Repetition," "Dull, Daily Reenforcement"
HERBERT W. SIMONS
hsimons at temple.edu
Thu Sep 18 07:55:11 EDT 2014
very perceptive. YES, there's a pattern here.
On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 4:13 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> At 84 I've given up out-living the Age of Neoliberalism. One of my reasons
> for this glum conclusion is the preponderance among men and women of good
> will of the views expressed by Ed Appel below, which he nicely summarizes
> in the following words: ". . . what’s happen, by DELIBERATE policy on one
> side of the aisle, and culpable acquiescence on the other, to USAmerican
> jobs, USAmerican taxation, and USAmerican debt. . . ."
>
> This is, I fear, the standard liberal understanding of the Democratic
> Party: They see that party as "opportunist," "cowardly," even "stupid."
> They fail to see that the DP is, as Glen Ford of Black Agenda puts it, "The
> More Effective Evil." It is the DP, primarily, that has determined U.S.
> policy over the last half century. (Consider the analogy to "Good Cop / Bad
> Cop." It is the Good Cop (the DP) who does the real damage. Three acts by
> the Carter Administration marked the all-out assault on the working people
> of the U.S.:
>
> 1) Carter's virtual signing of of Bishop Romero's Death Sentence
> 2) The Deregulation of Air lines and trucking
> 3) The appointment of Volcker as Fed Chairman
>
> Subsequent administrations have but filled in the dots. Some of the high
> poits:
>
> Reagan's crushing of PATCO
> Clinton's pushing through of NAFTA
> Clinton's Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism Act
> Unanimous Congressional Approval of Afghanistan and Iraq aggressions
> Senator Warren's aggressive support of Israel War Crimes
>
> As to Obama, he richly exemplifies Noam Chomsky's observation that "War
> Criminal" is part of the job description of U.S. presidents.
>
> Ed is certainly correct that no Left exists in the U.S. Earmarks of a
> hypothetical Left:
>
> 1. Liquidate the Prison System
> 2. Withdraw all U.S. troops from the world
> 3. No U.S. Foreign Aid (it is all open or disguised military aid to
> tyrannies)
> 4. Open Borders. No human is Illegal.
>
> Carrol
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: kb-bounces at kbjournal.org [mailto:kb-bounces at kbjournal.org] On
> Behalf Of Edward C Appel
> Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2014 1:58 PM
> To: wessr at onid.orst.edu
> Cc: kb at kbjournal.org
> Subject: Re: [KB] "Trivial Repetition," "Dull, Daily Reenforcement"
>
> Bob and All,
>
> Your list for “trivial repetition and dull, daily reinforcement”
> by the left would be as good as mine. Maybe we could start by taking a cue
> from Teddy Roosevelt, much on the agenda at PBS the last three nights. TR
> comes across as a ridiculous,
> I’m-altogether-right-and-you’re-altogether-wrong, heroism-obsessed blowhard
> in some ways, but as also a great man, great leader, and great egalitarian
> spirit, as well. (Not perfectly egalitarian, for sure, but wondrously so
> for his time.)
>
> Roosevelt’s mantra about the Constitution being for the good of
> the people as a whole, rather than vice versa, a strait jacket into whose
> supposedly tight 18th-century constraints all contemporary common sense has
> to be bound, should be our guiding principle, too (see Burke on the
> “Dialectic of Constitutions,” GM).
>
> The first question I’d ask, though, is, where do we find the
> USAmerican political “left? I know one place I can find the left-wing US
> commentariat. See the amalgam of voices gathered together on
> CommonDreams.org, for instance. But among our political leaders? Maybe
> Warren and Sanders, but even Sanders echoes Obama on the taxation question:
> The wealthy ought to be paying “a little bit more.” A LITTLE bit more?
> When their contribution to the commonweal has gone from 51 percent of
> earnings 60 years ago to about 16 percent today, less than the average
> middle-class earner? When average CEO pay has burgeoned from 40 to 1 to
> 400 to 1 in respect to average salaries in a given industry in the past
> three to four decades? When a candidate for the presidency can get away
> with disclosing one, and only one, tax return, at 13 percent (!), and still
> run for that highest and supposedly exemplary office, and get away with it?
>
> I don’t see much of a “political left” in our nation, or much of a
> sense of what a “political left” should look like, among our citizenry.
> (See Donald Barlett and James Steele, The Betrayal of the American Dream,
> for requisite numbers; see Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas, on
> how Democrats have become only “marginally better” than Republicans; see a
> study by Martin Gilens [Princeton] and Benjamin Page [Northwestern] on how
> “’the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule,
> near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,’”
> [“Disease of American Democracy,” Robert Reich, 8/21/14], as the result of
> the takeover of political outcomes by Congress’s and the executive’s
> corporate paymasters.)
>
> But, if we had a “political left” of some dimensions (let’s
> fantasize!), what would be the three most salient issue-positions I’d
> recommend a strong, repetitive, dull, daily emphasis upon? It would be the
> two I recommended in “Democratic Narrative” and in my post on the nefarious
> Iraq War, to wit:
>
> Drum home “agaaaiiinnn and aggaaaiiinnn and agaaaiiinnn” (I can
> hear FDR exclaiming it!) what’s happen, by DELIBERATE policy on one side of
> the aisle, and culpable acquiescence on the other, to USAmerican jobs,
> USAmerican taxation, and USAmerican debt, over the last three and a half
> decades. American jobs have been exported to low-wage sweat shops in Asia,
> Indonesia, Mexico, and beyond, to the economic benefit of the
> entrepreneurial class, who can then sell their products to consumers
> worldwide. They don’t need Americans to make their goods, nor do they need
> them as much to buy their goods. Manufacture cheap and sell across the
> globe. You lose your high-paying factory job as a result? Go work for
> McDonalds!
>
> And while we’re at it, let’s cut taxes to the bone. “Starve the
> beast!” As Reagan insiders Donald Stockman and Bruce Bartlett have
> revealed, the idea was to cut taxes to such an extent, and run up deficits
> so onerous, Congress and some future administration would be forced to
> dismantle the “welfare state.” George W. Bush admirably followed suit, at
> the outset of his dubious war, no less!---and there’s reported evidence on
> things that Bush privately said that indicate he was just as deliberate.
> (See Venomous Speech: Problems with American Political Discourse on the
> Right and Left, pp. 109-116, for ample documentation.)
> Democrats left fingerprints over all of this chicanery, as well.
>
> Who’s got clean-enough hands to pound home this narrative,
> repeatedly, in our day, and the political courage to boot?
>
> More, later, on the other two mantras, and how Heath and Heath
> might simplify the tale---and on the "identification" angle.
>
>
> Ed
>
>
> --------------------------------------------
> On Mon, 9/15/14, wessr at onid.orst.edu <wessr at onid.orst.edu> wrote:
>
> Subject: Re: [KB] "Trivial Repetition," "Dull, Daily Reenforcement"
> To: "Edward C Appel" <edwardcappel at frontier.com>
> Cc: kb at kbjournal.org
> Date: Monday, September 15, 2014, 9:58 PM
>
> Ed, Burke is surely right
> about the power of repetition. The
> advertising industry leaves no room for doubt about that.
>
> What
> identifications might the left try to repeat ad nauseam?
>
> What might Burke advise?
>
> Bob
>
> Quoting Edward C Appel <edwardcappel at frontier.com>:
>
> > Burkophiles,
> >
> > I asked in a
> chapter in Praeger’s Venomous Speech last year, “Where
>
> > Is the Democratic Narrative, FDR
> Style?” That piece had mainly to
> >
> do with the polemical malfeasance of the Dems in dealing with, >
> rhetorically pretty much ignoring, what globalization has done to >
> aggravate the income gap in USAmerica the past three and a half >
> decades. (Tax policies are culpable, too, we know, in multiple > ways.)
> Senator Warren appeared on Moyers on PBS last Sunday. She > listed four
> Democratic proposals she thinks are winning issues going > into the Fall
> elections. Moyers asked her why, then, aren’t we > hearing more about
> them from Democratic candidates and their > spokespersons? Warren
> really had no good answer.
> >
> > Burke says in
> the Rhetoric (p. 26), “Often we must think of > rhetoric not in terms of
> one particular address, but as a general > BODY OF IDENTIFICATIONS that
> owe their convincingness much more to
>
> > trivial repetition and dull daily
> reenforcement than to exceptional
> >
> rhetorical skill” (emphasis in original).
> >
> > I monitor Fox
> News daily. That propaganda network masquerading as > a news channel (I
> know, we can say the same thing about MSNBC) is > near-fanatically
> repetitive in promoting its conservative,
>
> > anti-Obama agenda. Fox is
> relentless. Case in point: Bill O’Reilly > has invidiously targeted the
> President in his opening “memo” for as > many nights as I can remember.
> Another: Wish I had even one dollar > for every time I’ve watched our
> consulate in Benghazi burn on my > Channel 48. They don’t let up.
> >
> > Add this mantra to the list: Bush 2 “won” our righteous “War on
> > Terror” with the surge in Iraq. Obama came into office, took our >
> troops out of that country, and now has “lost” a war that Bush, > Cheney,
> Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz had brought a U.S. victory and peace > to!
> >
> > The
> rhetorically inept, more accurately altogether missing,
>
> > response by Obama in his “leading
> from behind” speech on Wednesday,
> >
> and in his fumbling precursors to that address, are dispiriting.
> >
> >
> First and foremost, Obama was and is uniquely situated to >
> characterize the Iraq War for what it plainly was: A mendacious >
> military adventure, foisted on USAmerica by subterfuge and > deception,
> a cynical exploitation of the shock of 9/11, not merely a
>
> > “dumb war.” Fifteen Saudis and
> four Egyptians, under the leadership
> >
> of a wealthy Saudi, trained in Afghanistan, highjacked four >
> commercial jetliners and perpetrated the mayhem of that frightful > day.
> Saddam, we knew even then, had nothing to do with it. Nor did > his
> chemical weapons, if they even had existed and they didn’t, nor > did his
> so-called “mushroom cloud” potential, pose any real threat > to this
> nation. Again, we knew even then that Iraq’s nuclear > ambitions, even
> if real, were as yet no more than hope, if not > fantasy. And, for anyone
> paying attention, the Bush-Cheney > fear-mongering had already been shot
> down in an op-ed in the NYTimes > by Ambassador Wilson, and by
> clear-headed reporting > by the McClatchy News Service.
> >
> > So, what happened after waste of a trillion dollars (it will be >
> three trillion or more after medical expenditures are exhausted a >
> half-century from now), loss of thousands of American lives, tens of >
> thousands of maimings and woundings, and destruction and shattering > of
> this jerry-built nation of warring sects that only a tyrant like > Saddam
> could hold together—what happened after the candidate who > promised to
> end the Iraq War came to power? He stopped calling the
>
> > war what it really was and started
> treating it pretty much like a
> >
> somewhat legitimate enterprise we had to bring to an end
>
> > “responsibly.” Obama was even
> planning to keep fifty thousand (or
> >
> was it eighty thousand?) troops in Iraq in perpetuity, before >
> al-Maliki said “no way”
> to our insistence on military immunity. > (And Obama doesn’t even defend
> himself on that issue.) > >
> You may object that Obama had to metamorphose into a “war >
> president,” since he was then Commander-in-Chief. Can’t in any way >
> imply that our soldiers died in vain in a conflict subversively >
> motivated by oil, Israel, Bush family score-settling, or plans for >
> victorious re-election in 2004 by a flight-jacketed president after >
> “Mission Accomplished.”
> >
> > Upshot: There exists a corrupt
> context to what Obama and USAmerica
> >
> face in the current chaos of the Middle East. It is a context that >
> requires repetition and more repetition still by leadership that has >
> some semblance of the near-self -destructive insanity of America’s >
> vaunted “War on Terror.” As he takes us into yet another phase of >
> this resource-draining, quick-sand tugging, tar-baby of a conflict, >
> someone with a megaphone has to stand up and shout down the McCains > and
> Foxies who current occupy the rhetorical terrain uncontestred.
> >
> > I have no hope that Obama’s the
> one.
> >
> >
> > Ed
> >
> >
> >
> >
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>
>
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--
Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Communication
Dep't of Strategic Communication, Weiss Hall 215
Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
Home phone: 215 844 5969
http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons
Academic Fellow, Center for Transformative Strategic Initiatives (CTSI)
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