Let My People Go

Hank Williams's comparison of the President to Hitler has led Slate to ask, "Before World War II, who was the rhetorical worst person in history?"

If You Don't Like It, Turn the Dial to the Left

As my friend Emma Burnette points out, the GOP's selection of "class warfare" as a topos was undoubtedly focus-grouped up the ying-yang, but may very well backfire on them.

Especially if the 99% can turn it on them (see the Aristotelean topos of "turning the tables" (#6): "Another line is to apply to the other speaker what he has said against yourself."). Warren Buffett has already begun to do some of this work on our behalf.

Dale Carnegie Goes Orwell

While looking at Dwight Garner's evisceration of “How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age,” it became clear to me (since I'm always someone slow to pick up on the obvious) that Orwellian doublespeak has become the language of prestige in contemporary discourse, that it sings for the people who work on Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

This new adaptation seems to have been composed using refrigerator magnets stamped with corporate lingo: “transactional proficiency,” “tangible interface,” “relational longevity,” “continuum of opportunities,” “interpersonal futility,” and “our faith persuasion.” The devastation, in terms of Carnegie’s original charm, is nearly complete. Were Carnegie alive to read this grievous book, he would clutch his chest like Redd Foxx in “Sanford and Son,” smile wanly for a few minutes (he didn’t like to make others feel bad), then keel over into his cornflakes.

The following sentence, which appears on Page 80, is so inept that it may actually be an ancient curse and to read it more than three times aloud is to summon the cannibal undead: “Today’s biggest enemy of lasting influence is the sector of both personal and corporate musing that concerns itself with the art of creating impressions without consulting the science of need ascertainment.”

Emoticons & Speed

Why email is a bad way of conveying emotional information. (It's essentially the same reason that online discussions tend to devolve into typed-out shrieking.

Your Relationship with the Media

If TV news was a person you were dating, things might go like this.

Sometimes the best way to take a look at something is to pick it up and move it.

Gandhi's Lobotomy

A lot of those inspirational sayings you've seen on the web? They aren't quite as pithy and cheerful as you think they are.

For one thing, anybody who pays attention to rhetoric at all would realize that it's a real stretch (in both cultural and gender terms) to imagine Nelson Mandela saying, during his 1994 Presidential inauguration, "We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?"

Doesn't that sound a whole hell of a lot more like a self-help guru in L.A., who shows up on Oprah a lot? Which is what it actually turns out to be.

WWII Propaganda Poster