Speechless

On August 2, someone posted a video of a verbal violence between the coach of the University of Pittsburgh debate team, Shanara Reid-Brinkley, and William Shanahan, the coach of the debate team at Fort Hays State University in Kansas.

According to the Post-Gazette, the melee ensued after Reid-Brinkley accused Shanahan of striking her from a judging panel because of her race. (Shanahan says that he did so because she gave low scores to his team in previous contests.) But instead of filing a protest through normal channels, Reid-Brinkley literally took it to the house.

It's unclear what is going to happen to either of these coaches. Unfortunately, the focus seems to be solely on Reid-Brinkley and not on Shanahan. (There is a viral video on YouTube calling on people to harass her and the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, but no such campaign targeting Shanahan.) [*See Below] Still, lots of thinks occur to me as I view this video:

1. This is humiliating to the entire discipline of communication and rhetorical studies. Reid-Brinkley and Shanahan come from two of the top departments in the field (Georgia and UT Austin, respectively), and Reid-Brinkley teaches in one of the top departments in the field. Quite simply, these people are supposed to reflect the best that the field has to offer, which scares me.
   
2. The discipline of debate and argumentation is not about winning arguments and tournaments. It's about learning how to make and defend arguments—especially difficult and controversial arguments—with respect and civility. Both instructors have failed in the most categorical way possible.
   
3. Having an advanced degree is not the same as having emotional maturity. In fact, graduate education may hinder people from developing the human skills necessary to survive in the world. (Incidentally, priestly formation in Catholicism emphasizes human formation in addition to pastoral, intellectual, and spiritual formation. Perhaps graduate education should similarly add human dimensions to its educational programs.)
   
4. There's an edited book in here somewhere. Scholars in the field need to engage this issue, not to condemn it but to find ways out of it.
   

* I stand corrected. The same folks have put out a video on Shanahan as well.

Corsi's confabulation

Jerome Corsi, the author of the anti-Kerry book Unfit for Command, has written another book attacking Obama entitled Obama Nation, the title being a fairly unimaginative pun describing what he thinks an Obama presidency would be. (Lest anyone be confused, he explains the origins of this turn of phrase to you.)

But this book isn't anything like its predecessor. Nope. We know this because Corsi says so in his preface (reprinted on the New York Times website):

Any implication that this book is a “Swift Boat” book is not accurate in that John O’Neill and the other members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have had nothing to do with this book, its analysis and arguments, or my opposition to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

It's just "Swift Boat"-like.

As I thought about the appearance of Corsi's book, which I will never read, I thought about the problem of what philosopher Sissela Bok calls confabulations, stories where truth and lies are so closely interwoven that no one can tell the difference between the two.

In the case of Corsi's confabulation, he finds the hidden prejudices of his target audience (which, admittedly, aren't hard to spot) and then dumps so many disembodied "facts" on those prejudices that it's impossible for anyone to fact-check what he says. Of course, Corsi, whose academic pedigree is prominently displayed on the title, postures as if he is producing real research. "My intent in writing this book," he says, "is to fully document all arguments and contentions I make, extensively footnoting all references, so readers can determine for themselves the truth and validity of the factual claims." Yet, as with Unfit for Command, his narrative is full of cherry-picked quotations, innuendos, and bold-face lies.

Even so, the power of his story comes not from the fact that it "hangs together" (what rhetorical scholar Walter Fisher calls narrative coherence) under scrutiny, but from the fact that it coheres just enough that it plays into the biases the audience already brings to the text. For these folks, who are already pretty much convinced that Obama is a radical leftist and probably an Islamist Manchurian candidate to boot, Corsi's book will mysteriously "ring true" (the quality of narrative that Fisher describes as narrative fidelity). And therein lies its power.

From a public relations perspective, the problem with confabulations like this, whether they are called Unfit for Command or The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, is that they are the mutant viruses of public discourse. Once they are out in the public conversation—and especially when they are put in print in a best-selling book—they are often there to stay. You may be able to defeat them, but they will always come back in a different form. Obama's team is much more proactive than Kerry's was, but it's unclear how effective they will be.

Because high school is supposed to suck

"The most time and cost efficient way of gaining a white person’s trust and friendship is to talk to them about their time in high school," says our resident authority on Stuff White People Like. "Virtually every white person you meet was a nerd in a high school—it it is how they were able to get into a good arts program and law school. As such, their memories of high school are painful, but not tragic since they were able to eventually find success in the real world. Exploiting this information is your one way to ticket into the heart of a white person."

But white folks have nothing on South Koreans. The cram culture of South Korean high schools, Choe Sang-Hun reports in the New York Times this morning, makes suicide the second highest cause of death among teens in that country. The South Korean college entrance exams are brutal, and because going to particular schools tracks a person for life, students face immense pressure to do well.

But if you don't get into the college of your choice, there's always SUPER CRAM SCHOOL! Which is like high school would be like if you were in prison, in the military, or a Republican:

Jongro [the school profiled in the piece] opened last year. Its four-story main building houses classrooms and dormitories, with eight beds per room. The school day begins at 6:30 a.m., when whistles pierce the quiet and teachers stride the hallways, shouting, “Wake up!”

After exercise and breakfast, the students are in their classrooms by 7:30, 30 per class. Each room includes a few music stands, for students who stand to keep from dozing.

A final roll call comes at 12:30 a.m., after which students may go to bed, unless they opt to cram more, until 2:00 a.m.

The routine relaxes on Saturday and Sunday, when students have an extra hour to sleep and two hours of free time. Every three weeks the students may leave the campus for two nights.

The curriculum has no room for romance. Notices enumerate the forbidden behavior: any conversation between boys and girls that is unrelated to study; exchanging romantic notes; hugging, hooking arms or other physical contact. Punishment includes cleaning a classroom or restroom or even expulsion.

Wimps. That's not what it was like in the good old days:

Kim Sung-woo, 32, who teaches at Jongro, remembered the even more spartan regimen of the cram school that he attended. In his day, he said, students desperate for a break slipped off campus at night by climbing walls topped with barbed wire. Corporal punishment was common.

Now that's an education.

Postmortem on Hillary

Joshua Green of The Atlantic has written a postmortem on the Clinton campaign. It's fascinating reading, and it shows the ways that communication campaigns can explode. But it also affirms what I've thought for some time: that running for presidency itself is a far better display of presidential capacity than the specific policies that the candidate endorses or any perceived "experience" for the position. "Two things struck me right away," Green writes after reading the hoards of interoffice correspondence preserved by the senior campaign team.

The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-the-game emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea all along) and the small details (campaign staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinsky, who lived there, to avoid any surprise encounters). The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House. But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.

Yet, I feel for Clinton and her team. They did have a plan, and it was a good plan. The problem was that it wasn't good enough, and no one could figure out how to crack the Obama code. (And to be fair, I'm not sure how I would have cracked the Obama code, either.) But in the moment of confusion, Clinton made the biggest mistake of all: She started beating her staff.

In the hours after she finished third in Iowa, on January 3, Clinton seized control of her campaign, even as her advisers continued fighting about whether to go negative. The next morning’s conference call began with awkward silence, and then Penn recapped the damage and mumbled something about how badly they’d been hurt by young voters.

Mustering enthusiasm, Clinton declared that the campaign was mistaken not to have competed harder for the youth vote and that—overruling her New Hampshire staff—she would take questions at town-hall meetings designed to draw comparative,” but not negative, contrasts with Obama. Hearing little response, Clinton began to grow angry, according to a participant’s notes. She complained of being outmaneuvered in Iowa and being painted as the establishment candidate. The race, she insisted, now had “three front-runners.” More silence ensued. “This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself,” she snapped, and hung up.

Not that the staff didn't deserve a beating, of course, but here they needed a sense of direction and leadership that only Clinton herself could have provided. She was the one who hired Mark Penn, she was the one who ultimately decided on the direction of the campaign, and she needed to be the one who righted it. But she didn't. And so she lost.

She could have won, but this campaign is not about competence in running the federal bureaucracy but about vision. Americans are uncertain about the new world where they now find themselves: a world of terrorism, a shrinking middle class, a plugger economy, and environmental uncertainty. They don't want a policy wonk who can give them better policy programs. They want a visionary who can help them understand what those policies and programs mean. Or, as Obama put it: “It’s true that speeches don’t solve all problems. But what is also true if we cannot inspire the country to believe again, it doesn’t matter how many policies and plans we have.”

Obama has given his vision, but McCain still hasn't. And if he can't, he'll have a Hillary problem, too.

Georgia on my mind

Late last week, when fighting erupted between Russia and Georgia over the disputed regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, there were some concerns as to who, exactly, was the aggressor. Were Georgian forces moving into those regions to restore order, or were they, as the Russians claimed, perpetrating genocide? Or was Russia using humanitarian concerns as a pretext to force a democracy that was leaning too far to the West into subjugation?

The consensus (in the West, at least) seems to be that Russia is the aggressor—Russia has been overtly hostile to Georgia for years and has imposed sanctions, including natural gas, designed to starve the country into submission—but there seems to have been slow preparations for hostilities on both sides. Such preparation would account for how quickly hostilities rose to their current levels of violence.

If Georgia did prepare for—and perhaps even expected—conflict, this raises significant questions: If they had no hope of winning (other than by waging war to arouse the anger of the West), why did Georgia even consider military action as being a viable option in the first place? Is this a desperate act of a desperate people, or did the West promise to help?

In some ways, neither side seems to be fighting a purely just war. Of the two, of course, Russia has a much harder case to make, since Russia's sanctions could be considered an act of aggression, and their use of force seems far from proportionate. But while self-defense is certainly a just cause, it could be charged that Georgia provoked this attack, and if this is so, this raises significant problems, because just wars have to have a reasonable expectation of success. And given the significant civilian casualties, neither side seems to be showing the restraint necessary to limit civilian deaths.

Headlines:

• Georgia Fight Spreads, Moscow Issues Ultimatum (NYT)
• In Georgia and Russia, a Perfect Brew for a Blowup (NYT)
• Taunting the Bear (NYT)
• South Ossetian refugees head north to flee ruins of war (Guardian)
• Russia criticises US for flying Georgian troops back from Iraq (Guardian)
• Bush, Cheney Increasingly Critical of Russia Over Aggression in Georgia (Washington Post)