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DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Words in a time of war By Mark Danner
(This commencement address was given to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric
at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May 10.)
When my assistant greeted me, a number of weeks ago, with the news that I had
been invited to deliver the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric,
I thought it was a bad joke. There is a sense, I'm afraid, that being invited
to deliver the speech to students of rhetoric is akin to being asked out for a
romantic evening by a porn star: whatever prospect you might have of pleasure
is inevitably dampened by performance anxiety - the suspicion that your
efforts, however enthusiastic, will inevitably be judged according to stern
professional standards. A daunting prospect.
The only course, in both cases, is surely to plunge boldly ahead. And that
means, first of all, saluting the family members gathered here, and in
particular you, the parents.
Dear parents: I welcome you today to your moment of triumph. For if a higher
education is about acquiring the skills and
knowledge that allow one to comprehend and thereby get on in the world - and I
use "get on in the world" in the very broadest sense - well then, O esteemed
parents, it is your children, not those boringly practical business majors and
pre-meds your sanctimonious friends have sired, who have chosen with unerring
grace and wisdom the course of study that will best guide them in this very
strange polity of ours. For our age, ladies and gentlemen, is truly the Age of
Rhetoric.
Now I turn to you, my proper audience, the graduating students of the
Department of Rhetoric of 2007, and I salute you most heartily. In making the
choice you have, you confirmed that you understand something intrinsic,
something indeed ... intimate about this age we live in. Perhaps that should
not surprise us. After all, you have spent your entire undergraduate years
during time of war - and what a very strange wartime it has been.
When most of you arrived on this campus, in September 2003, the rhetorical
construction known as the "war on terror" was already two years old, and that
very real war to which it gave painful birth, the war in Iraq, was just hitting
its half-year mark. Indeed, the Iraq war had already ended once, in that great
victory scene on the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of San Diego, where the
president, clad jauntily in a flight suit, had swaggered across the flight deck
and, beneath a banner famously marked "Mission Accomplished", had declared:
"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United
States and our allies have prevailed."
Of the great body of rich material encompassed by my theme today - "Words in a
Time of War" - surely those words of George W Bush must stand as among the
era's most famous, and most rhetorically unstable. For whatever they may have
meant when the president uttered them on that sunny afternoon of May 1, 2003,
they mean something quite different today, almost exactly four years later. The
president has lost control of those words, as of so much else.
At first glance, the grand spectacle of May 1, 2003, fits handily into the
history of the pageantries of power. Indeed, with its banners and ranks of
cheering, uniformed extras gathered on the stage of that vast aircraft carrier
- a stage, by the way, that had to be turned in a complicated maneuver so that
the skyline of San Diego, a few miles off, would not be glimpsed by the
television audience - the event and its staging would have been quite familiar
to, and no doubt envied by, the late Leni Riefenstahl (who, as filmmaker to the
Nazis, had no giant aircraft carriers to play with). Though vast and
impressive, the May 1 extravaganza was a propaganda event of a traditional
sort, intended to bind the country together in a second precise image of
victory - the first being the pulling down of Saddam Hussein's statue in
Baghdad, also staged - an image that would fit neatly into campaign ads for the
2004 election. The president was the star, the sailors and airmen and their
enormous dreadnought props in his extravaganza.
However ambitiously conceived, these were all very traditional techniques,
familiar to any fan of Riefenstahl's famous film spectacular of the 1934
Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will. As trained rhetoricians, however,
you may well have noticed something different here, a slightly familiar flavor
just beneath the surface. If ever there was a need for a "disciplined grasp" of
the "symbolic and institutional dimensions of discourse" - as your Rhetoric
Department's website puts it - surely it is now. For we have today an
administration that not only is radical - unprecedentedly so - in its attitudes
toward rhetoric and reality, toward words and things, but is willing, to our
great benefit, to state this attitude clearly.
I give you my favorite quotation from the Bush administration, put forward by
the proverbial "unnamed administration official" and published in the New York
Times Magazine by the fine journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004. Here, in
Suskind's recounting, is what that "unnamed administration official" told him:
The
aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community",
which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your
judicious study of discernible reality". I nodded and murmured something about
enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the
world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we
act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -
judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which
you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors
... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
I must admit to you that I love that quotation; indeed, with your permission, I
would like hereby to nominate it for inscription over the door of the Rhetoric
Department, akin to Dante's welcome above the gates of Hell, "Abandon hope, all
ye who enter here."
Both admonitions have an admirable bluntness. These words from "Bush's Brain" -
for the unnamed official speaking to Suskind seems to have been none other than
the selfsame architect of the aircraft-carrier moment, Karl Rove, who bears
that pungent nickname - these words sketch out with breathtaking frankness a
radical view in which power frankly determines reality, and rhetoric, the
science of flounces and folderols, follows meekly and subserviently in its
train. Those in the "reality-based community" - those such as we - are figures
a mite pathetic, for we have failed to realize the singular new principle of
the new age: power has made reality its bitch.
Given such sweeping claims for power, it is hard to expect much respect for
truth; or perhaps it should be "truth" - in quotation marks - for, when you can
alter reality at will, why pay much attention to the idea of fidelity in
describing it? What faith, after all, is owed to the bitch that is wholly in
your power, a creature of your own creation?
Of course I should not say "those such as we" here, for you, dear graduates of
the Rhetoric Department of 2007, you are somewhere else altogether. This is,
after all, old hat to you; the line of thinking you imbibe with your daily
study, for it is present in striking fashion in Michel Foucault and many other
intellectual titans of these last decades - though even they might have been
nonplussed to find it so crisply expressed by a finely tailored man sitting in
the White House.
Though we in the "reality-based community" may just now be discovering it, you
have known for years the presiding truth of our age, which is that the object
has become subject and we have a fanatical follower of Foucault in the Oval
Office. Graduates, let me say it plainly and incontrovertibly: George W Bush is
the first Rhetoric-Major President.
The dirtied face of power
I overstate perhaps, but only for a bit of - I hope - permitted rhetorical
pleasure. Let us gaze a moment at the signposts of the history of the present
age. In January 2001, the Rhetoric Major President came to power after a savage
and unprecedented electoral battle that was decided not by the ballots of
American voters - for of these he had 540,000 fewer than his Democrat rival -
but by the votes of Supreme Court justices, where Republicans
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knowledge that allow one to comprehend and thereby get on in the world - and I
use "get on in the world" in the very broadest sense - well then, O esteemed
parents, it is your children, not those boringly practical business majors and
pre-meds your sanctimonious friends have sired, who have chosen with unerring
grace and wisdom the course of study that will best guide them in this very
strange polity of ours. For our age, ladies and gentlemen, is truly the Age of
Rhetoric.
