SCHOOLS DO NOT TEACH HOW TO READ RHETORIC

Some years ago -- triggered by 9/11 -- there was a flat statement that irony was dead.  The idea was clearly a troll that snagged popularity for the writer’s articles about the catastrophe-- the very event was full of ironies.  I won’t make a list because that’s not what this piece is about.  I’m talking about the general public’s inability to see what’s right in front of them, much less the layers underneath or the echoes reverberating overhead.  Most people didn’t have enough life experience or ability to apply analysis to written material in order to read beyond “face value” or media sensationalism.  It’s not the sort of thing that shows up on multiple choice answer sheets.

I once had a principal who could NOT understand why anyone would keep a fiction book.  “Once you know what happens, there’s nothing else.”  He thought history was only names and dates, battles and discoveries.  It is a heresy to say that women who read romance ebooks at the rate of one a day are not really reading.  Even if the writing is not skillful enough to reveal ironies, insights, political contexts, etc. one can always consider the book itself, how it was published, what it implies in terms of the lives of the readers, or even the moral cultural lessons.  “English” as a subject often triggers worry about “correctness” because of moral and class connotations.  

In seminary I tried to understand what rhetoric was and never got a decent explanation, even from a professor of poetic rhetoric.  It means the choice and arrangement of the actual words in sentences, not about clarity and proper usage -- though that, too -- but more about the “grammar” of the whole arrangement of phrases, the sequencing of the steps in an argument or explanation, the writer’s awareness of the reader.  I’d been doing it, more or less, but blindly.  There was something blocking my ability to see it.  I think it was the same thing that causes people to accuse me of being “flip.”  A refusal of consistency.  Maybe a valuing of casual and even offensive language, so long as it’s meaningful.

Rhetorics are are governed by attitudes and conventions.  I like to change my attitude, to look at the other side, to escape the conventions.  Often the conventional is meant to obscure the subject, to simplify or candy-coat or soften controversy.  It can imply there is only one legitimate way to think about or express something.  Using that way is obviously dishonest and often meant to defend ownership, like a particular ethnic or gender or disability-defined group insisting that they are the ONLY proper writers and that their point of view (which is assumed to be the ONLY version proper to the assorted people in that group) must suppress all others.  Ironically this is the opposite of the potential uses of rhetorical grammar. 

Partly it's a misreading of a school of thought that was barely being defined by the fermenting literary and philosophical ideas of the Seventies.  Those thinkers, called post-structural or post-modern, were usually defined by the idea of underlying structures that reveal differing or even contradictory ideas that had been taken for granted.  Assumptions of entitlement.  It’s the origin of the insight that to a Blackfeet the same sentence might have quite a different “vibe” than to a non-Blackfeet but it's not a justification for gagging all non-Blackfeet.

Beyond that, the new thought disciplines were part of the whole questioning of culture -- a phrase which has quite a different implication from calling it “the interrogation of society,” which summons images of someone tied into a chair under a light too bright to see an interrogator who might resort to torture.  That’s when kids wore t-shirts that said, “Question Authority!” and their parents finally bought their own t-shirts that was the same on the front but said on the back, “And listen to the answers.”  That was re-framing, taking the idea of authority as oppressors to the idea of authority as knowing something.  The words were the same, but the sub-text was different.

Suddenly, esp. to drug takers (including coffee, cigarettes, and beer), “reality” was negotiable and -- judging by the results -- not always efficacious.  I mean, reality can be unjust, reprehensible, destructive, and altogether in need of revision.  “Reality” can be a rhetorical box that prevents good outcomes or any notion of change.

Beyond drugs, physiologists in a sub-category now called neuro-research have been figuring out how little dabs of molecular structure know anything in the first place.  How does the outside world get to the inside thought-world and what do we do with all these phantasms that dance through our heads?  Conversely, what do we do about the often very emotional and identity-protecting convictions that make us do things we don’t necessarily want to do, even if the consequences are lethal to ourselves and others -- individually or en masse.  How do we get through to each other?  Can we help each other?

Even this political cartoon strip has a rhetorical structure to it -- the sense comes partly from the sequence and partly from the strategy of making writing into little characters, including the Old Testament man gradually realizing he is out-numbered.  Far more effective than pointing out history.  Brains create these little structures without necessarily having to make them conscious, but once a person realizes they are there, one’s eloquence and vocabulary are greatly expanded.  It’s what a competent graduate school teaches.  With a computer’s ability to include images along with words or words through images or the concepts by which one mixes them -- well, then a person reaches for music, weaving in the logical rhetoric of sound and a writer is doing something like three-dimensional chess.

Teachers should be using several languages, including the ones that are sub-categories of English -- IMproper English -- because that’s where the insight often arrives.  It’s about alternatives, a range of strategies.  I include in this not just the languages of violence -- which are so enthusiastically  promoted -- and not just the languages of sex -- which everyone pretends to condemn -- but the SEVERAL languages included in these hot-cha got-cha subjects.   KINDS of talk about sex, KINDS of violent talk.   Anatomy; medical descriptions of disease and trauma, including starvation; the use of words in bullying, intimidation, and brown-nosing.  Bullying comes from the ag world, right?  Bull fights.  Bull-baiting with bull dogs.  Pit bulls.  But then it leaks over to politics where the “bully pulpit” is supposed to be a good thing.  The bovine trope of rhetoric.

According to the anonymous authors on Wikipedia, intimidation is sometimes called “cowing.”  To be “cowed” is the reciprocal reaction to bullying.  “Threatening behaviors may be conceptualized as a maladaptive outgrowth of normal competitive urge for interrelational dominance generally seen in animals. Alternatively, intimidation may result from the type of society in which individuals are socialized, as human beings are generally reluctant to engage in confrontation or threaten violence. . . Intimidation related to prejudice and discrimination may include conduct "which annoys, threatens, intimidates, alarms, or puts a person in fear of their safety...because of a belief or perception regarding such person's race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, religious practice, age, disability or sexual orientation, regardless of whether the belief or perception is correct.

Turning the trope around!  

Lists of words with lots of syllables sound so official.Consider the quite formal and multisyllabic rhetoric above: it is that of liberal political correctness.  Surely a person who speaks like this is educated and would NEVER bully or cow!!   The next paragraph is explicitly legal.

Intimidation may be manifested in such manner as physical contacts, glowering countenance, emotional manipulation, verbal abuse, making someone feel lower than you, purposeful embarrassment and/or actual physical assault. “Behavior may include, but is not limited to, epithets, derogatory comments or slurs and lewd propositions, assault, impeding or blocking movement, offensive touching or any physical interference with normal work or movement, and visual insults, such as derogatory posters or cartoons.”  No mention of death threats against writers and cartoonists.

There is a more blunt follow-up list that includes the following:  “Fear mongering,” “Fit in or fuck off,” “Gaslighting,”, “My way or the Highway.”  All are pejorative, some are rude, and there is no rhetoric outside the bovine dominating attitude.  Nothing about how to simply not accept herd-thought.  What can one expect from four-eyed, pencil-necked, pointy headed, nerd techies who dream of being Conan?  There is nothing about the third party: the ONLOOKERS who feed on humiliation of others.  Never intervening.

Are you picking up on the subtext here?  Where is the language to describe those who transcend intimidation?  EAT ME.  Walk on.

THE SOCIAL WORLD: WHO ARE ALL THESE OTHERS?

What do we know about how our brain operates in the social world?

THE CELL EVIDENCE: VON ECONOMO NEURONS

Spindle-shaped brain cells, called von Economo neurons—named for the man who first described them—are found only in human beings, great apes and a handful of other notably gregarious creatures -- like elephants.  Von Economo neurons are thin and elongated, with just one dendrite at each end. They are four times bigger than most other brain cells, and even in species that have the cells, they are rare.

(This stuff is from an article in the Smithsonian about a man called John Allman.  The author of the original article is Ingfai Chen and I lifted some whole sentences.)

From von Economo's work, Allman learned that the unusual cells seemed to reside only in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and one other niche of the human brain, the frontal insula (FI). Brain-scanning studies have established that the ACC and FI are particularly active when people experience emotion. Both areas also seem to be important for "self-monitoring," such as noticing bodily sensations of pain and hunger or recognizing that one has made a mistake. 

By contrast, the frontal insula may play a more specific role in generating social emotions such as empathy, trust, guilt, embarrassment, love—even a sense of humor. According to experiments that measure the workings of various brain regions, the area becomes active when a mother hears a crying baby, for instance, or when someone scrutinizes a face to determine the other person's intentions. The FI is where the brain monitors and reacts to "gut feelings" from bodily sensations or interactions within a social network, Allman says. It's the link between self-monitoring and awareness of others that makes it possible for us to understand the feelings of other people. "The basic proposition that I'm advancing," he says, "is the notion that self-awareness and social awareness are part of the same functioning, and the von Economo cells are part of that."

(When I was a little kid, I had a jigsaw puzzle of the States.  I keep wishing I had one for the named parts of the brain, a snap-together brain.)  Here you go!

THE DISFUNCTION EVIDENCE

William Seeley is another researcher.  He concentrates on pre-frontal or frontal temporal dementia which affect the ACC and FI.  (This is what changed my father, brother and cousin via trauma.)  Patients suffer a breakdown in their character, losing social graces and empathy, turning insensitive, erratic and irresponsible. Marriages and careers implode. Many patients seem to lack physical self-awareness: when diagnosed with other illnesses, they deny having any problems. Brain imaging studies of patients with the dementia have uncovered damage to frontal areas of the brain.

THE TRAUMA EVIDENCE or DELIBERATE LESION EVIDENCE IN ANIMALS

In humans, studies have shown a high percentage of head injuries in prison populations and disorderly people (like expelled students) at large.  The most vivid and most often repeated case was the man working with explosives that drove a tamping rod through the front of his brain.  He survived -- he just wasn’t Mr. Nice Guy anymore.

Trauma or lesion evidence is subtractive.  Most developments that help survival and therefore are “conserved” are additive -- bigger, more, new.  Sometimes they involve a new use of an old capacity, like alphabets coming out of super-simplified outlines of animals which is a hunting skill, an old nubbin of flesh finding a new use.

SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS

People live in groups: families, tribes, communities.  Social psychology is what studies the relationships and orderings among those people.  The scientists invent ingenious experiments.

1.  If you put people in a room who collude to say something contrary to reality or not to act in the face of a threat (smoke coming in through a vent), the individual who doesn’t know about this will do what everyone else does, even though his personal evidence is against it.

2.  If you get a group to watch Ronald Reagan giving a speech that in real life caused a lot of laughing, they will have a high opinion of RR.  If you get a similar group to watch the same vid without the laugh-track, they think he’s a little scary.  This is why a laugh-track is added to things that are supposed to make you laugh -- so you’ll react with what you think is a group.

PRACTICALITIES

An infant without a family is a dead infant.  A child without a family or with a hostile or dysfunctional family is a suffering child.  An adult without a family, a community, an affiliation,  is a crippled person.  An adult with a family, a community and so on, but whose affiliation with like-minded people is prevented by social pressure and stigma is so bereft of social support that they are in danger of suicide.

Bullying is when one person afflicts another because of aggression meeting vulnerability.  Mobbing is when a whole social group turns on an individual and tries to destroy them.  As a child, I was mobbed for being a crybaby, for being near-sighted (no sports skill), and for being “too smart for my own good.”  Mobbing can be physical (pursuit while throwing rocks) or social.  (Native American literature “flaming” in the Nineties when anyone not “full-blood” was accused of stealing -- often with the piling-on collaboration of white liberals.  Two well-known suicides.)

Narcissism is when one person is centered only on his or her self and relates to others by using them for their own ends.  There is also group narcissism where a gang insists it is better and therefore justified in whatever they do to the out-group.

INSTITUTIONS

Affinity groups -- people with a common cause -- become organized (consciously or not) into institutions, mostly related to place (like governmental bodies), economic relationships (ownership, territory), and value systems (religions, schools).  They can control lives by controlling access, knowledge, skill-building, and defense of ownership.  Institutions can operate like individuals: narcissistic, mobbing, hoarding, stigmatizing.  The more crowded the population is, the more hierarchical, rigid and punishing the institutions become.  At an extreme -- which we may have reached by declaring corporations to be zombie people -- an institution and its associated practices can destroy the conditions that make life possible.  Religions are institutions.  

PAIR-BONDING

Some feel that the attachment of two people, most often parents of children, is the basic leggo block of all social life.  Certainly, what happens in the first years after birth will determine the individual’s understanding of how to relate to other human beings.  But there is no reason to confuse attachment with sex.  Gore Vidal famously said that the best way to preserve a lifelong bond is to keep sex out of it -- enjoy lots of sex, just not at home and not necessarily hetero.  It worked for him.

Again, other social animals teach us.  Elephants and chimpanzees are like us in needing each other and caring for each other. If economics, politics, or chance destroy dependable parental pair-bonding, the child produced may be cold, uncertain, bullying, and narcissistically affiliated -- always craving power and superiority.  (They might trust a dog.)

THE INTERNAL COMMUNITY

Some of my most valued companions are dead and have been for a long time.  They wrote books, they made movies, I knew them when I was a child, or in some other way they got into my head and heart.  They teach me how to demonize myself to seem big and dangerous.  They teach me how to be absurd and leave 'em laughin'.  They teach me how to be invisible, how to be valuable, how to to be taken for granted or not.  I could not go out without them.  They are my brain biota.

SURVIVING BULLIES

A long-time friend, a country grandpa, sent me the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TdkNn3Ei-Lg

Of course, a straightforward appeal like this is impossible to resist, though just exactly what to do about it is unclear. I asked my friend if he knew what happened after the video went to YouTube and this is what he said:

In the follow up, he has received a lot of support and offerings of support. In just a very short time his video has hit over 3 million hits. You may want to peruse the site and the comments...a mixed bag of hostility and support...the kid, regardless, is hitting on some very key issues facing young people who do not fit the 'descriptions' of their hives.

As a kid, I was a bit of a loner. My Dad was an alcoholic, we were very poor and a family of 13, including Mom and Dad. My whole life at that young age was helping the family to survive. I checked my snares early every morning for breakfast, afternoons and evenings...and that was just one chore for survival. Any spare time, if I can call it that, was spent reading or doing homework by the lighting of a coal oil lamp...which I still have on top of my refrigerator. All of those factors added up to my oddness.

In addition, I was very small and quiet. I took some terrible teasing and some pretty bad physical insults. I was pretty strong but when they ganged up on me I was helpless. One time they dragged me up a pole and hooked me onto a peg by the back of my shirt and left me there. I never cried very much or reported any of the things that happened. Fortunately, on that occasion, my shirt was so worn out by previous owners, the cloth and collar gave out and I was able to fall to the ground. Ten feet is a long way down for a little runt kid.

The community I had originally been raised in was not like this. I had no experience for such behavior. However, by the time I reached about 13 and we were moved to an integrated school system, I knew how to take care of myself and the biggest bullies in the white school learned not to bother me. I was still a loner though. I spent most of my life self developing mentally, physically and spiritually but those days of incessant bullying have always remained a memory.

It is no longer painful but very sad our fellow human beings can entertain such atrocious behavior toward one another. At one point, I was about 10 yrs...the bullying put me in the hospital for two weeks. I still remember that person to this day and on recall and envision that happening. However, its not good to.

All of my children and grandchildren have taken training in martial arts. I did so for myself when I was 16 and I can guarantee you that in high school no one bothered me. I became the most enduring long distance runner, I was much too small for sprinting, and the top gymnast of all the schools in the city. I didn't mean to do that and did not start out with that destination in mind. I do recall how I would pull together into my being and activity my body, mind and spirit. It was almost trance and I still recall a beautiful place to be. I still do it when confronted with a stressful situation.

My youngest grandchild, a five year old girl, is in Karate along with her older sister and brother. She is so cute. She told her instructor after a couple of lessons that she was starting to remember everything her grandfather taught her. I showed them some center of gravity stabilization moves and stances, mostly offensive moves and a few very simple defensive moves also...just enough to take the edge off someone trying to bully them. They are not going to live my experience if I can avoid that. Anyhow, the instructor and her Mom thought that was hilariously cute. So do I...lol.

Anyhow that is somewhat of a condensed version of my experience with bullying and coping. I usually keep a lid on it but this one young boy got to me. I was that age and that way at one time.

My friend and I have not talked about whether this boy was thrown off or victimized by all his new-found friends and enemies. A person needs a kind of emotional “martial arts” as well as the physical when the response comes on such a scale.

But I asked if I could put both the vid and my friend’s “testimony” on this blog. He said it was okay if he were kept anonymous. It’s a version that is more positive than most.

My own memory of bullying is mostly embodied by somehow offending my primary school class on the playground, probably by dropping the ball in a game. I was pretty near-sighted and uncoordinated. They chased me, throwing things, and a ball or something hit me in the face. When the teacher saw me, she sent me to the washroom, but then sent along Melva Jean. Melva Jean’s mother was divorced and this was long enough ago that it meant to everyone that she was somehow tainted. But MJ was tough and defiant, with a compassionate side. (Which might have been like her mother.) She knew the washroom very well because she constantly thought up excuses to go there to hoard paper towels so she could draw on them. While I threw cold water on my face, she stocked up. She also shared her philosophy of life, which was mostly a matter of pushing boundaries.

I googled Melva Jean, but there are many of them and she’s no doubt married by now -- something. After all, we’re in our seventies. She and her mom moved away before we got to high school. It doesn’t take a million YouTube hits to reassure a person -- just one will do. And sometimes the best Christmas gift (or any other time) is a hand on a shoulder.