Political discussion is just getting weirder and weirder. On Meet the Press this morning the President claimed that discretionary spending has gone down since 2001. This is patently false. He also claimed that prior to war, everyone thought that Iraq had WMD, a line that is and has been stumped continually. This was suspect. See this too.

The glh is trying, or attempting, to cover four courses in this space including the addition of notes pertaining to a reading group entry and, later on, discussions of hypertext. It’s a lot to cover. The cats are set. Composition posts will go under “rhetoric,” British Literature under “British Literature,” Creative Writing under “writing.”

I see the comp course, both comp 1 and comp 2, as fitting into the large heading of rhetorical theory, under the broader header “how do we persuade and do we explain and why.”

In comp we’re starting with a fundamental process that will fit into a time scheme of about six weeks for the first paper so that we can kill two birds with one stone: lots of discussion of developing ideas and enough analysis to work in some concepts necessary to grow on for later work.

1. Topic development and using a procedure for working to a finished work.

2. Analysis of concepts.

The concepts for those students who are going be trickling in around here will come in mutiple forms: what forms of persuasion will we be after in the course, studying in other words; how definition forms a foundation for disputation, analysis, and connecting with an audience and understanding their needs; and textual analysis.

A message from Simon Jones of Media Lab Europe. Who’s up for a Dublin trip:

The next OPEN_HOUSE will take place on Tuesday February 24th 2004 in Dublin.

The theme of this OPEN_HOUSE is ” Changing Connections” .

How will we communicate with our friends and loved ones twenty years from now ?
How can interface technologies prompt and mediate a sense of intimacy ?
How will new technologies help us to create new senses of kinship and relatedness ?
Where are the new digital divides and how can we bridge them ?

The keynote speaker will be Peter Cochrane, co-founder of ConceptLabs and former Chief Technologist and Head of Research for BT.

Full details are being finalised at present and invitations will be sent out next week.

OPEN_HOUSE at Media Lab Europe is a global meeting point where some of the world’s greatest minds and leading companies gather to invent the future. As a participant, you gain access to some of the ideas & insights that are seeding innovation and may ultimately help you to achieve your business vision.

In British Lit we talk a lot about leadership, authority, and power and soon in English Composition. How does one get these and keep them–at many levels: argument, poetry, action. In a recent article in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria writes about the growing issue between the US administration and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq. He begins this way:

There really should be no contest.

On one side is history’s most awesome superpower, victorious in war, ruling Iraq with nearly 150,000 troops and funding its reconstruction to the tune of $20 billion this year. On the other side is an aging cleric with no formal authority, no troops and little money, who is unwilling to even speak in public. Yet last June, when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani made it known that he didn’t like the U.S. proposal to transfer power to Iraqis, the plan collapsed. And last week, when Sistani announced that he is still unhappy with the new U.S. proposal, L. Paul Bremer rushed to Washington for consultations. What does this man have that the United States doesn’t?

Legitimacy. Sistani is regarded by Iraqi Shiites as the most learned cleric in the country. He is also seen as having been uncorrupted by Saddam Hussein’s reign. “During the Iran-Iraq war, Sistani managed to demonstrate that he could be controlled neither by Saddam nor by his fellow ayatollahs in Iran, which has given him enormous credibility,” says Yitzhak Nakash, the leading authority on Iraqi Shiites.

Characterizations aside, this developing interplay is interesting as the conflict continues and moves toward other resolutions. Will the deadline for elections be met? Will a tranfer of power play out the way it has been envisioned and articulated. Zakaria concludes:

A power struggle has begun in Iraq, as could have been predicted — and indeed was predicted. Sistani is becoming more vocal and political because he faces a challenge to his leadership from the more activist cleric Moqtada Sadr. “Al-Sadr does not have Sistani’s reputation or training as a scholar and thus presents himself as a populist leader who will look after Shia political interests,” Nakash says. It’s turning into a contest to see who can stand up to the Americans more vociferously and appeal to Shiite fears. The Iraqi Shiites are deeply suspicious that the United States will betray them, as it did in 1992 after the Persian Gulf War, or that it will foist favored exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi upon them. Sistani recently told Iraq’s tribal leaders that they should take power, not “those who came from abroad.”

The tragedy is that while Sistani’s fears are understandable, Washington’s phased transition makes great sense. It allows for time to build institutions, form political parties and reform the agencies of government. An immediate transfer would ensure that the political contest will overwhelm all this institutional reform. But Washington lacks the basic tool it needs to negotiate with the locals: legitimacy. (This is something well understood by anyone who has studied the lessons of Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor.) Belatedly it recognizes that the United Nations can arbitrate political problems without being accused of being a colonizer.

U.S. policymakers made two grave mistakes after the war. The first was to occupy the country with too few troops, creating a security vacuum. This image of weakness was reinforced when Washington caved to Sistani’s objections last June, junked its original transition plan and sped things up to coincide with the U.S. elections. The second mistake was to dismiss from the start the need for allies and international institutions. As it turns out, Washington now has the worst of both worlds. It has neither enough power nor enough legitimacy.

The question of legitimacy comes charged with all kinds of baggage and pressures we can’t see but must infer from surfaces. Who can distribute resources effectively and why? How do we learn who to please for some gain, who to step on without loss? Importantly, who can lay claim to decision-making? Not enough power and not enough legitimacy, Zakaria writes. There’s a dance going on here.

Here are some recent published numbers for TV ad spot by the Dems. The source is the Wisconsin Advertising Project:

Total Democratic Presidential Candidate TV Ad Spending and Spots (Through 1/9/04)
Gov. Howard Dean $6,628,000 14,066 spots
Sen. John Kerry $4,123,000 6966
Sen. John Edwards $3,277,000 7348
Rep. Richard Gephardt $2,975,000 6538
Gen. Wesley Clark $2,391,000 3134
Sen. Joe Lieberman $1,580,000 2079
Rep. Dennis Kucinich $61,000 165
Lyndon Larouche $29,000 28
Total $21,064,000

This is, of course, lots of money and in the current world of politics obscene realism. But as Mark Twain once said, American’s have a real problem with proportion.

Distinction: Mythology is the study of myth. It is also their telling. The attitude that we take toward the factual past depends partly on how we determine facts and which facts we consider important. Facts are real in the sense that “things happen.” But I’m interested in why some stories take priority over others and how they are told. I don’t necessarily come at the subject matter of British literature in a pure literature sense, because that’s not an approach that I feel, from my point of view, gives people a sense of the possibilities of what people have said and done in human experience, in a past that can be constructed that will help people make decisions about what they face today. Rina finds it interesting that the Victorians were human beings (I know, Sarina, this is an exaggeration of your point). The question becomes: whom does it serve to insist that the Victorians were prudes? Why would those who came after assume this notion?

Saddam Hussein has been found, looking, as Calpundit writes, like “Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa.” Interesting because at the dinner table today my wife and I were careful to explain to our kids that that bad cat on the TV wasn’t Santa Claus, though he sort of looks like Santa after his seasonal cruise. The way I picture it.

Do the subjects of myth, in a sense, provide rhetorical frames for expressing ideas? Saddam, this strange human monster (I can see McCarthy’s judge whispering sweet nothings in his ear), on TV, the inside of his gaping mouth, flashlight orange.

I’m not a Santayana epistemologist who agrees that we will repeat our mistakes if we avoid the study of history. We have to act; we can’t avoid action. Say a guy named B falls in love. He’s smacked by it. It’s like an ocean he’s fallen into. Where’s he going to go for advice?

By examining the cultural products, however they are made or what they are, such as Watchmen or Blood Meridian or Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” or our work in Iraq, what do we learn? I find it odd the video on TV of the long lines of people waiting for the rare Flu shot; they are a line of people like any other in any other time.

The Flu, it would seem, is a new Grendel.

I hope that people take my ponderings on this subject as the play that it is.

But I have to say I love Sarina Salemi, whom I hope creates a writing space that we can enjoy. In all seriousness. I love her thoughts on history. She claims that history is in the library. I can go with that. As long as she would agree that history must be “constructed.”

After all we would know nothing of George Washington or Honest Abe if we didn’t read or hear about them.

But my play goes to perception and environment and, of course, memory.

The fact of the matter is that to some people I don’t exist. For not knowing me they will live fine lives, I hope. Some people do know me. When I pass from this world, they will remember some part. “He was a fine chap, with some degree of humor,” they may claim. “He had no sense of fashion. His singing voice could tarnish silver and generate globs of earwax in the listener.” “He was six foot five.” “Really?”

“Who is Sarina Salemi,” I ask.

In our most recent English/Humanities Department meeting, our respected and energetic chair, Francena Dwyer, brought up the idea of a mythology course. I claimed that we already had several, one being U.S. History. This of course drew dark looks from Bob Brown, an esteemed historian.

Of course, mythology, rather than the course, say Mythology 101, implies a kind of logic not a subject. A friend of mine, Ron Weber, liked to define mythology as those stories that give people an identity, a locus, an anchor. The question becomes one of how to determine reality, truth, and causal chains, and what tools do we have to determine these.

Unfortunatly, we must use tools to figure the world. But we can’t figure all of it. We can dig up accurate pictures of why Crassus was given command of Syria in BC 55. The question is: why should we?

The question “what did the writers of the constitution intend” is important because law and policy today will be shaped by the answer, and this creates a world we must live with somehow (one based on interpretation). Interpretation, therefore, matters a great deal.

For me the answer is: history is a kind of mythology. Dark looks?

Spinning and Neutrino Man are talking, I think, about the personal in the weblog. Doesn’t the question go to purpose rather than effacement?

In a way what we write is always a test of occasion. In a conversation with Timmons last night we rested on a conclusion in new media writing that you write it and see what happens. Why not?

So it’s Saturday and I can’t help but thinking that I’m missing something. Did that exam not get written or changed; did I miss that email; do I have too much time on my hands? Questions. In American education rest periods begin much earlier than the actual breaks. We get’s lots of time off for the Christmas holiday and over the summer, but who would argue the opposite that the Christmas break doesn’t start just after Thanksgiving, the routines set into motion in September upset by shopping, food, visitors, and prep for next semester.

I found that I needed the break. Found a little time to work on stories, which I’m never comfortable with. Found time to catch up on la familia. All good things. Found time also to work on a few posts concerning teaching but that aren’t quit ready to go up.

The question is: can we have sustained and intense learning over breaks; will all the work that students have put into their subject be forgotten over the two month winter break?