Uncouth Reflections

Fenster writes:

The term rhetoric is an evocative one for an Ivy wannabe like me.  It summons up all the mysterious virtues of a classical education, the kind of education that some of the co-authors on this blog suffered through and now are prone to disparage.  Me, sure I know it’s all a crock, but as a first generation college student I can’t help it.  I am a sucker for such tropes (in the sense of cliche and not in the classic, rhetorical sense).

So I have checked out some recent books on rhetoric in the vain and fading hopes of self-improvement.  The topic seems on the rebound.  There’s Ward Farnsworth’s Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric, a decidedly upscale contribution to the form, with lots of details on epizeuxis and anaphora.  I liked it but was forced to acknowledge it as being a bit rich for my tastes, which are in the final analysis fairly plebe.

More accessible is Constance Hale’s Sin and Syntax,  a guide to “wickedly effective prose”.  The sin and wickedness angle is on point here: Hale’s work is a nice reminder that despite all the classical trappings, rhetoric was, and remains, a tool for simple persuasion, for getting people to where you want them to be even if you have to dissemble, prevaricate and prestidigitate to do so.  Rhetoric comes across as high-falutin’ and inaccessible but in truth it is the medium of our times.  It has been massified like everything else.  In advertising it is the masterful sell.  In politics, rhetoric’s natural home, it is spin.

Can rhetoric be counted as successful even if the artifice is clear?  In a sense, yes.  One can argue that persuasion is just the thing to catch our consciences, no matter how it is done.  Still and all, I like it better when I sense a true master at work, someone who is persuasive on the basis of true word magic.  With a true master, you might know it is all about persuasion, but you are happy to suspend your disbelief.

This is why I am such a regular and avid reader of Peggy Noonan.  I don’t always agree with her but damn, I like the way she writes and damn damn I find myself somehow more partial to her POV after a couple of exposures.  How do she do that?

Her most recent column has her describing the United States as A Nation that Believes Nothing.  Read the whole thing, as the saying goes.  In it, she uses the same kind of device I am trying to use here: attack spin and all it stands for as a way of persuading at some other level.

Everyone knows what the word spin means; people use it in normal conversation. Everyone knows what going negative is; they talk about it on Real Housewives. Political technicians always think they’re magicians whose genius few apprehend, but Americans now always know where the magician hid the rabbit. And we shouldn’t be so proud of our skepticism, which has become our cynicism. Someday we’ll be told something true that we need to know and we won’t believe that, either.

Nice rhetoric, there.