on catching-up

Music: Pandora: Steve Roach: Early Man (2001)

Since summer teaching and grading ended, I've been catching up on the "immediate to-do" list, which seems to get longer and longer every summer. This summer it has expanded to two whole index cards. Mon Dieu! Today I finished one of those items on the list:

• agency encyclopedia entry
• eclectic criticism chapter
• ideology encyclopedia entry
• review essay for journal
• Fight Club paper revision with Tom
• draft public address talk
• vocalic projectic essay R&R
• prep rhetorical criticism class
• prep EVP talk for psychology department
• contract with graffiti office to finish walls
• contract to repair water damage
• draft 6 myths of psychoanalysis essay with Chris
• revise "Zombie Trouble" with Shaun
• replace radiator fan
• make public address conference arrangements
• make NCA arrangements
• make fall speaker series arrangements
• write CD kitchen essays for August
• finish textbook proposal
• finish book chapter!

This, of course, is a lot to achieve in four three weeks. I don't predict I will succeed, but at least I know what train (wreck) lies ahead. I tend to tackle to-do lists like this as one would credit card debt: pay down/write the smaller stuff first, then move on to the bigger stuff. Correction: do the stuff with deadlines first, beginning with the smaller stuff. So the encyclopedia entries and the reviewing come first, then the R&Rs, then the draft of the public address talk.

Regardless, here's the latest bit, a small description of invention in "eclectic criticism" for undergraduates, which apparently I am said to do:

"The Rhetoric of Exorcism: George W. Bush and the Return of Political Demonology," by Joshua Gunn. Published in the Western Journal of Communication 68.1 (Winter 2004): 1-23.

In the months that followed the attacks on U.S. soil on September 11, 2001, "we the people" were traumatized and frightened. In the fall of that year and the spring of the next, I remember I was frequently flying across the country in search of my first academic job. Like everyone else I encountered in an airport, I was an anxious traveler. In early 2002, I vividly recall sitting in an airport bar in Dallas on a layover when President George W. Bush delivered one of his many, many speeches on Nine-eleven. All of us in the bar were staring at the television set, transfixed, disturbed, worried. Bush's speech was designed to comfort us, especially the folks in that bar, who were waiting to board an airplane. But I was unnerved by the speech, which used a number of biblical metaphors and the kind of language I remembered in church growing up. I was also startled that, as of yet, few media commentators were discussing the religious overtones of Bush's speechcraft.

I was raised in an evangelical Baptist church in a congregation that—I realize in retrospect—was itching toward Pentecostalism. I vividly remember the fiery sermons delivered by Brother Snooks (yes, that was his name). I remember the discussions we had in church about "spiritual warfare," about battling demons on a daily basis, about how listening to rock music was an invitation for demonic possession. Spiritual warfare is a concept, now fully formed in many evangelical and charismatic religious systems, that refers to the idea that mortal human beings must do battle with demons on a daily basis through prayer and various religious rituals, such as exorcism. When I heard Bush deliver his speeches after Nine-eleven, I couldn't help but think of the language of spiritual warfare.

One day, out of simple curiosity, I decided to research who Bush's speechwriters were. I discovered Michael John Gerson was Bush's chief speechwriter from 2001-2006. Gerson is an evangelical Christian who was responsible for penning many of Bush's more memorable, religious statements. It then occurred to me that the charismatic language of spiritual warfare was quite deliberate in Bush's speeches. Over lunch meetings and casual conversation I began sharing my ideas with friends. I argued that Bush's speeches spoke to two audiences: those who got the religious warfare references, and those who did not. I was surprised to learn that most of those who I shared my ideas with resisted my argument. I recall at one lunch meeting a colleague laughed aloud at the suggestion that Bush's speechwriters were employing the language of demonology. Few bought my argument that my personal background in evangelical religious beliefs gave me the authority to make arguments. In other words, if I was going to convince people that Bush's speeches since Nine-eleven were about spiritual warfare, I couldn't appeal to my own authority and experience, as valid as both were to me. I had to appeal to something in the speeches themselves.

When I was thinking about these ideas—and as Bush continued to make even more religious references in his speeches—I was invited to interview for a job in California. Part of the interview consisted of a guest lecture in a rhetorical criticism class. I decided I might try-out my arguments on Bush's speeches. I wanted to offer an argument to the students about what I saw in these presidential addresses, but I also needed to teach them something about rhetorical criticism. I cannot detail exactly how or why I landed on the approach that I did: it just came to me. Genre criticism was the way to go with Bush's speeches.

Genres are patterns that are repeated in discourse of all kinds. Most of us are familiar with film or music genres: "romantic comedy," "hip-hop," "horror," and "alternative rock" are just some examples. Speeches also have genres: a eulogy or presidential inaugural addresses, for example, are just two of many types of speech genres. Regardless of the kind of discourse, though, all genres have patterns that create expectations in people. So, if I was going to go to a funeral, I would expect to hear a eulogy, and that eulogy would praise the deceased. My expectations would be violated if I went to a funeral and a speaker began attacking the dead person as a liar and criminal.

Bush's post-Nine-eleven speeches were designed to meet expectations, so there had to be some generic norms. I printed out and read all of Bush's speeches from September 11, 2001 until November 11, 2002. As I read the speeches, I looked for repeated patterns that might form expectations in those who heard them. What I found were not so much formal patterns---that is, what a president should do and say to a general audience---as I did informal or indirect patterns that closely modeled an experience that religious people know well: the conversion experience. If you are an evangelical, you are probably familiar with this story (quite literally embedded in the song, "Amazing Grace"): a lost soul meets misfortune and woe until, having discovered Jesus and accepted him as one's own "personal savior," one is "born again." Or to put the pattern alternately, "I was blind/but now I see."

I noticed something else about Bush's speeches too. He used a lot of demonic metaphors to describe "the enemy." He kept talking about "smoking [the enemy] out of their holes" and purging other countries of "evil." What I had already unconsciously noticed at the Dallas airport bar suddenly became clear to me: Bush's speeches repeated a religious conversion narrative, but one that premised conversion on the casting out of evil. I was reminded immediately of the film The Exorcist, in which a couple of priests cast a demon out of a girl in order to save her soul. I concluded that Bush's speeches were rhetorical exorcisms.

When I went on my job interview, I taught the students about genre, and then presented them with information about Spiritual Warfare, and in particular, about the casting out of demons. In charismatic literature, to cast out demons one has to name the demon, argue with it, battle with the demon, and then cast it out. I provided the students with a copy of Bush's 2002 State of the Union address and asked them to locate the pattern of exorcism in the speech. They did, without much difficultly. At that moment I knew that I was on to something that others could see also if I just presented the argument in the right way. After my presentation, one of my colleagues urged me to write up the lecture as an article and publish it. So I did.

Writing criticism and teaching it, however, are two different things. I knew that the generic approach to criticism would not be enough, as more was going on in Bush's speeches. It seemed to me that Bush's speeches were not just patterned, but that the pattern was highly emotional and perhaps worked at levels we are not consciously aware of. So in writing up my criticism, I also decided to discuss myth (deep, culturally based patterns we all absorb as members of a community) and psychoanalysis (the idea that patterns repeat in our heads, not just out there in texts). The resulting rhetorical criticism was "eclectic" in its methodological approach: by combing close textual analysis with generic, mythic, and psychoanalytic criticism, I offered a reading of many of Bush's speeches as an exorcism. Had I done a simple generic criticism, or not thought about how the speeches work emotionally, my reading of Bush's rhetoric would have been much less insightful. It was only by "thinking outside of the box" and using the approach that best got at the dynamics of the speech that I could make a compelling case. To me, this is the key to eclectic criticism: you must let the object you are criticizing help you determine the method of analysis that you use.