Militarism and Memorializing at the Pro Football Hall of Fame

More than ever, entertainment industries work in concert with the US armed forces in the rhetorical production of militarism. This is especially the case in sport, where leagues such as the National Football League routinely make war imagery and military personnel a focal point of football culture. One such iteration of this relationship is the “Pro Football and the American Spirit” exhibit that is part of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Understood as an example of public memory, this exhibit reveals sport's capacity to normalize war and reduce the available models of citizenship in the United States.     

Dynamic Rhetorics of Race: California's Racial Privacy Initiative and the Shifting Grounds of Racial Politics

In October 2003, Californians voted in the high-profile gubernatorial recall election and on what is referred to as the “Racial Privacy Initiative.” The Initiative sought to prohibit the gathering of racial data in education and state employment. Unlike recent such initiatives addressing California's racial laws, this one was unsuccessful: 62 percent of voters said no. This essay examines the discourse surrounding the initiative over its three-year history and traces the rhetorical dynamics that led to its defeat. The analysis details the implications of this moment for hegemonic processes in general and as they relate to the specifics of race.     

Therapeutic and Material <Victim> hood: Ideology and the Struggle for Meaning in the Illinois Death Penalty Controversy

This article analyzes the struggle over the <victim> ideograph following former Illinois Governor George Ryan's decision to commute all state death sentences in 2003. A therapeutic rendering of the <victim> ideograph typified mainstream opposition to Ryan's move. This approach personalized the death penalty at the expense of discussing its social and political implications. In contrast, the discourse of George Ryan and his supporters offered a material <victim> hood grounded in political, historical, and economic contextualization. By performing a historical materialist critique of this dialogue, I conclude that rhetorically deploying the figure of a material <victim> is an indispensable strategy for the abolitionist movement in that it allows activists to capitalize on the ideological constraints of liberalism while maintaining an awareness of capital punishment's implications in a capitalist society.     

Seinfeld's Democratic Vistas

Academic appraisals of Seinfeld frequently criticize the series as apolitical or as advancing a nihilism that threatens contemporary American society. I counter that the show is better understood as a political satire that advances a robust democratic discourse predicated on inefficiency, leisure, and excessive talk. I argue that Seinfeld's discourse provides a vision of hope for democratic interaction predicated on the commonality of vices rather than a collapse into fascism or the disciplining of rhetoric by presumably higher moral standards.     

立片言以警策:新闻标题的炼字锻句问题

现代传播媒介已不仅限于传统的平面媒体(报纸)一端,传媒形式的多样化特别是网络的发达,使得各种新闻的总量成为真正的海量。在这信息爆炸的时代,在各种新闻"泛滥成灾"的情况下,如何将某一有价值的新闻及时有效地传达给受众,让其发挥应有的作用,就成为考验新闻写作者或新闻编辑者语言表达智慧的一道无可回避的试题。为了使所要传播的新闻最大限度地为受众了解,新闻写作者或新闻编辑者就必须在新闻标题的炼字锻句方面下功夫,注意表达技巧,在第一时间内迅速抓住受众的注意力。新闻标题需要讲究表达技巧,但要遵循"自然"、"贴切"的原则,不能"为修辞而修辞"。     

The Populist Chameleon: The People's Party,Huey Long,George Wallace,and the Populist Argumentative Frame

This essay argues that a sustained form can be located in the complicated history of populist rhetoric. Despite its chameleonic qualities, the advancement of populism is constituted by alterations in the focus and content, not the structure, of populist activism. This structure, or what I term its argumentative frame, positions a virtuous people against a powerful enemy and expresses disdain toward traditional forms of democratic deliberation and republican representation. I trace these themes through the rhetoric of the People's Party, Huey Long, and George Wallace. I conclude by analyzing the link between populism's persistence in U.S. history and the nation's Founding.     

Power Lines: The Rhetoric of Maps as Social Change in the Post–Cold War Landscape

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of state socialism in Eastern and Central Europe, cartographers were faced with choices on how the new post–Cold War political landscape would be mapped. One such group called the Pluto Project had been producing atlases since 1981 with a progressive point of view about the nature of state power in the Cold War. This essay examines two of the Pluto Project's atlases as they function to identify a radical cartographic style that animates the social control of space by subverting traditional cartographic forms and defying scientific expectations and standards.     

Positioned in/by the State: Incorporation,Exclusion, and Appropriation of Women's Gender-Based Claims to Political Asylum in the United States

Extending an important rhetorical tradition of investigating women's positioning/positionalities in the national imaginary, in society, and in the law, this essay examines how non-US citizen women and their experiences are deployed toward objectives of the US state. Specifically, I analyze the rhetorical significance of two precedent-setting gender-based asylum cases, those of Fauziya Kassindja and Rody Alvarado, to understand the different ways non-US women are positioned by the state. These cases reveal that women claimants, depending on the nuances of their claims, are incorporated into the state as “good” women, pushed to the margins because their rhetoric is “threatening,” or appropriated by the state because their “otherness” provides an image that the United States can deploy in demonstrating itself as the “good” state that protects and supports women.     

From Infantile Citizens to Infantile Institutions: The Metaphoric Transformation of Political Economy in the 2008 Housing Market Crisis

The logic of political economy depends on a domestic metaphor, using the oikos or household as a model for the polis. Historically, this metaphor has imagined citizens as the children of a paternal state. However during the 2008 housing crisis, this metaphor was turned upside down, depicting citizens as the parents of infantile state institutions. Although initially portraying citizens as juvenile “delinquents,” the rhetoric of the mortgage crisis ultimately repositioned citizens as surrogate caretakers for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant politico-economic institutions that constituted the majority of the mortgage market. In this way, the rhetoric of the housing crisis inverted both the metaphorical and material structure of political economy.