Re: Current events--too rhetorical?

[cj <jeney@GRIFFON.MWSC.EDU>]

Perhaps it's my Burkean tendencies, but I teach my students that there is
a rhetoric of the body, that minds are in bodies, that mind/body are not
separate but one. I submit that some of us run into burning towers to
bring out the endangered while others rush into ash-filled streets to help
those who have stumbled, and that this is a powerful statement of the
body. Rushing in and working to save others is no less a rhetoric than is
looking on from a distance through a camera lens and struggling to
verbalize the events.

Were I in any condition to distance myself from the week's events, I might
want to ask complicated questions about the rhetoric of those
photojournalists who lied, saying they were rescue workers, to gain
admission to "ground zero" and get exclusive footage. Were they serving a
higher cause? Or betraying a trust? This is not merely a policy question
for a child of Vientam's lies... I am Woodstock's little sister, I trust no
report given by the suits in times of strife. And yet I understand the
wrongness of lying to rescue coordinators and possibly endangering others
with reckless behavior.

At this stage, my mind is so slowly sifting, and I am still working out why
it is that I understand why we zoom the president off to safety, and then
listen to the audio feed when he's in a position to give a (rhetorical)
statement. And yet, the rhetoric of zoom has somehow stabbed me, I feel
struck from behind, I did not like that the leader went zoom, while the
workers ran into the fire. I know, I do know it is a good s.o.p., and that
we don't want the figureheads taken down in a crisis.

Yet the statement made by the physical fact of a president -- our fearless
leader -- whisking overhead in a jet with two flanking F-16's was no less
rhetorical than the hand of a young man, who reached down to an older man
sitting on a curb, overcome and choking.  While they staggered together,
helping each other out of the soot and debris, while the deafening crash of
falling concrete... while bodies on the ground moved in and out, to escape,
to save, to guide or just to stare ... the ones zooming overhead composed
hollow words (the safest kind) and put on their TV makeup, because their
job was to explain the inexplicable.

Distance is an illusion.

CeeJ
jeney@mwsc.edu