Created on 7/6/10 12:17 PM
My first viewing of English Downfall I thought how clever the text since I agree with the poststructuralist decentering convention and the loosening of constraints in writing that came down from Aristotle. That the debate still rages over constraints and codes that had excluded The Other is beyond me. My personal encounters with traditionalist—younger writers who not only cannot make room—in the 21st century—for alternative, experimental texts, but are angered and insulted when presented with such texts to critique does give the texts of English Downfall weight. However, once I watched Rebuttal to English Downfall I was ashamed that I had allowed the text I agreed with to blind me to the images impact. Even as I watched the woman console the weeping younger woman an image I associated with the SS rounding up of Jews to be sent to concentration camps and gas chambers I questioned but denied the justification of appropriating such historically powerful images. Although my partner did not loose family in the Holocaust hi finds the easy flinging about of Nazi imagery ill informed and offensive as he let me when I once made reference conflating my some Right Wing talking point to Nazi Germany. We visited an elderly woman for many years who was basically confined to her home from the effects of recurring polio she had contracted on a ship to California as a young Jewish woman fleeing the Nazis. She and her father and sister, she had lost her mother as a child, had been able to buy their way out of Germany when Hitler was still allowing Jews to leave before enforcing The Final Solution—that would exploit and exterminate every European Jew.
Words do matter Shawn as strongly states, however silencing debate is perhaps more dangerous that the misappropriation of images, not Shawn’s point, as noted I agree with his call for mindful rhetoric. We are culturally immune to micro-aggressions as Doug Walls defines with cutting humor in The Case for Mindful Rhetorical Media Use. The out right racist insults flung at President Obama in designed code to mark him as Other, foreign that therefore his defines his presidency as illegitimate by questioning his birth place. Yes, liberals (myself included) have used the same cultural tropes against former President Bush regardless that his presidency was marked by the Supreme Court deciding the winner of the 2001 presidential election the use of cultural tropes was as misguided then as it is now if for no other reason then it set precedent. But, how do we collectively create a sea change in how we view each other when we are not even conscious of buying into long standing conventions of stereotypes? I can’t remember which essay, Anne Frances Wysocki’s “The Multiple Media of Texts” or in “Teach Digital Rhetoric” where I read about responsibility of the artist, it was Art 21, one of the five blogs I like, that asked, “do the artist have a social responsibility?” This was a topic Tony Bolton addressed in her recent visit to Professor Jane Maher’s Biography class. Ms. Bolton spoke passionately about not writing stereotypes on the page because in life “people come after those resembling the stereotype with a bat.” This was a very strong point taught at Goddard and required to address in Final Project contextual essay. Again I had a personal experience when in attempting to write a villanelle I used the language of media to write about 911, again my wonderful adviser, Metta, clearly pointed out my unconscious proliferating of a new cultural trope.
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