I just saw the cover design for the next edition of Emerging and it’s awesome.  But, hey, I’m a visual design geek so no big surprise there. What does surprise me is that as often as we teach visual argument, as many textbooks as there are on the subject, we rarely consider the visual arguments encoded in textbooks themselves. This fall I’m going to change that.  I’m going to ask my students to unpack the argument of our textbook—from the cover design, to the layout, to the font choice.  Then I will ask them to consider the same questions in relation to academic papers.  Why one inch margins?  Why double spaced?  Why Times New Roman? Everything is designed.  Everything is packed with meaning.  I’m hoping these exercises will get students to see that and to practice broader acts of interpretation, analysis, and meaning-making. How about you?  How do you approach issues of visual design and argument? ... View more

I’m hoping things are budgetarily cheery in your world; here at my institution they’re looking a bit bleak.In particular, we’re facing a lot of pressure for our summer classes. We’ve already raised the caps on our FYC course by four, and I’m not sure the administration is done yet.These courses are nearly impossible to begin with: how do you squeeze sixteen weeks of writing into six? We generally cut out two papers, but even then the course moves at breakneck speed with writing due just about every class. With our caps up, we’re thinking about how to streamline the class even more.It's sad when pedagogy suffers because of budget.But it has me thinking, how do other institutions handle the general challenge of delivering writing courses in the summer? Do your summer classes last as long as the classes in a normal semester? If not, how to do you compress all that learning into so little time? What do you keep, what do you sacrifice, and what do you change? ... View more

One of the questions I believe is among the most important a cultural critic can ask is, “Whatever happened to the spirit of the sixties?” How, that is, did a generation who questioned the growing materialism and social inequities of their country end up participating in the creation of a society where those same inequities have widened to the dimensions of a veritable socioeconomic Grand Canyon, while their own conspicuous consumption has made that of their parents look like ascetic self-denial? In asking that question I am not looking down on that generation: I am of it myself, though I have been able to steer clear of what I see to be its excesses. Part of what has helped me to avoid the siren song of consumption has been my knowledge of and admiration for what was once a central American value. The colonial-era writer St. John de Crevecoeur called this value “competency”: that is, the achievement of an economic middle ground between luxury and poverty, comfort without excess. That, Crevecoeur opined in his Letters from an American Farmer, was what America was all about. The valuing of competency has collapsed in the decades since the sixties. The explanation for what caused this collapse lies far beyond the scope of this blog, but we can get an interesting glimpse from the 1983 film The Big Chill. Frankly, I didn’t like the movie much. I found its last-minute happy ending to be both contrived and unconvincing, and I didn’t even like the soundtrack. But the movie did point to a development that is an important part of what transformed the spirit of the sixties into a new Gilded Age. The plot of The Big Chill involves a reunion of a group of former college students who, though they remember their days of radical political fervor with nostalgia, have since become the leading edge of what in the 1970s were first rather derisively termed young urban professionals, or Yuppies. One character is a lawyer who expressed her social conscience by becoming a public defender, only to find herself appalled by the crimes committed by her clients and tempted by a lucrative offer from a corporate law firm, which she has accepted. Another is a doctor, whose husband has founded a successful running-shoe company, which is about to become more successful via an acquisition by a larger company (and he is not above sharing insider trading secrets with an old friend who has become a radio psychologist). There’s also an upper-middle-class housewife (married to a business executive) and a more or less upper-class actor. Only one of the old group remained true to his values,  and his suicide is the cause of the reunion. What I find most interesting in the film is its very accurate assessment of a social development that has only intensified in the three decades since its appearance: the rapid expansion of America’s upper middle class. This expansion has produced what is essentially a new class, one that I call “upper-class light,” that has prospered even as the traditional middle class has been under a continuous siege that has reduced many of its members to lower-middle and lower-class status. Indeed, when the Occupy Movement speaks of the 1%, it should be recognized that that 1% is not entirely made up of the upper class: much of it is upper middle, and its prosperity has come largely at the expense of the middle class. (I see something of this happening in the growing conflict between university administration, whose pay scale is upper-middle class, and faculty, especially at public colleges and universities, who are largely middle class, or lower-middle class if in the adjunct ranks; and it certainly happens when corporate upper management sacrifices middle management while preserving its own security.) This goes quite against the grain of classic Marxist theory, whereby the downfall of the bourgeoisie was supposed to be at the hands of the proletariat. Instead, the haute bourgeoisie are devouring the petit bourgeoisie. (It’s notable in this regard that Jeff Goldblum’s character in The Big Chill, which is identifiably middle rather than upper-middle class, is treated in a rather humiliating fashion in the movie by being given a child’s bed to sleep in and being refused the stock tips that are given out to William Hurt’s character.) The irony of all this goes back to that great Walt Kelly line from the comic strip Pogo: that is, as the middle class looks to discover just what has happened to it, it could well say, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.” ... View more

One of the classes I’ve been teaching this semester is Advanced Exposition. I’ve framed it, though, as Queer Composition. It’s been an interesting semester, in part because most of the students took the class because they needed to, but also because all of them have come to embrace explorations of rhetorical genres that emerge out of LGBTQ experience: everything from cruising to camp to disco.The entire semester has been focused on identifying and analyzing the generic features of each of these rhetorical forms, but for our last week we’re turning that process around in a very special way.Last week we looked at the "It Gets Better" video as a specific genre. This coming week, using what we learned, we’re going to make our own video for the project. I have to say that for me, personally, this is exciting. Not only do the students in the class get to compose for a real-world audience, and not only do they get to do so in new media, but I get to compose with them. More than that, I get the chance to make a difference.Keep an eye out for our video on the It Gets Better Project's website. Just look for ENC 3310 from FAU! ... View more

I just finished work on the Instructor’s Manual for the next edition of Emerging (thanks to the help of two teachers in the program here, Ashley Harrington and Michelle Hasler). Like everything else with the book, it represented a significant amount of work. Unlike the rest of the book, though, I often wonder about the value of this work, mostly because I’ve never really used Instructor's Manuals before.That, of course, has a lot to do say about my institutional and pedagogical histories. I grew up in a program that gave us all the training and encouraged us to craft our own assignments and class activities. I took that philosophy with me when I left.But what about you? Do you use the Instructor’s Manual for the text teach with? What for? What do you look for in an Instructor’s Manual? ... View more

In my last blog I offered a definition of what critical thinking entails, but to keep within the bounds of the blog I did not explore any examples. This week I'd like to offer a case study in the need for critical thinking in everyday life. One of the keys to critical thinking is the ability to see everything in context—that is, in relation to other relevant information. So, let's take the current libertarian strain in American politics that is challenging the existence of both Social Security and Medicare on behalf of lower taxes for individual taxpayers. Since this libertarian view is visible both in the Tea Party ideology, which has come to dominate Republican Party policy, as well as in the candidacy of Ron Paul (whose base is significantly represented by younger voters), it is a significant feature of current political life, having moved into the mainstream after years of marginal status. That makes it very much worth thinking about. I want to examine this from the point of view of someone who embraces libertarian thinking, not from a counter-ideological viewpoint. To begin with, then, libertarianism is a species of individualism (ultra-individualism, one might say), and so reflects a long-embraced American cultural mythology. The libertarian individualist believes that it is in his or her own best interest not to have to pay any taxes for the support of someone else. Ignoring the moral aspects of such a position (and as I said in my last blog, while moral judgments are not absolutely excluded from critical thinking, they are certainly marginal to it), let's look at it from the perspective of the individual.  Young libertarians are especially drawn to the position that they should not have to pay taxes to support an older generation, and contend (at least implicitly) that they will be able to take care of themselves when they grow old, in part by saving and investing the money they didn't pay in taxes. Seen by itself, and not in relation to any other factors, it might appear that being relieved of such taxes might accrue to the advantage of the individual. But nothing ever happens in isolation. If, in the current instance, Social Security collapses (and every day there are new warning signals that it is heading for bankruptcy unless revenue increases can be achieved—a hopeless hope) and Medicare is drastically cut back (which is very much a threat in the Republican budget proposals), Americans of retirement age will either choose not to retire or retire much later than they had planned to. This would have two damaging effects on the young libertarian. On the one hand, if the older generation delays retirement, their jobs will not be made available to younger job seekers (indeed, when the U.S. Congress in the 1970s abrogated all mandatory retirement age rules, there was a great fear—not at all unjustified—that there would be a disastrous effect on an entire generation of young scholars). On the other hand, older workers who do retire, but without adequate Social Security or Medicare support, are likely to be compelled to fall back on their adult children for assistance (this is already happening, just as adult children are returning to the parental nest because there aren't enough jobs for them available). In either case, young libertarians (and young everyone else) are going to have to pay a steep price. To see this one has to employ critical-thinking skills by seeing the relationship between actions. Note how one's own moral commitments are neither necessary to the analysis nor particularly helpful. At any rate, it is highly unlikely that a libertarian can be convinced that there is a moral duty to help others (indeed, Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a book much beloved by libertarians, has offered to them a logical argument in defense of their position; but as I noted in my last blog, logic alone does not constitute critical thinking). By analyzing the real-world relationships between actions and beliefs, however, we can reveal how the libertarian position on Social Security and Medicare is contradictory, not logically but experientially. Given the power of libertarian thinking in American society today (most remarkably among the young), this is no trivial revelation. ... View more

So I recently leased a new car before my old one died. It’s a Fiat 500 Pop, it’s red, it’s adorable, and it’s a manual. Funny thing is that I’ve never driven a manual transmission before—I’m an automatic kind of guy. But manual meant the best deal and the dealer was more than happy to spend some time giving me lessons until I got the hang of it.I’m doing okay. I’m getting better. But there’s still a part of me that tenses up before I have to drive. There’s a part of me that’s actually afraid of my car. And the truth is that I don’t think I breathe until I’ve shifted into fourth gear.I was thinking today that it’s funny how something so familiar (driving) can suddenly become so terrifying (driving a manual). I was thinking about how my students might feel the same way when they come to my FYC classroom. I mean, they’ve been writing for most their lives but suddenly I am demanding that they use new skills. I wonder if they tense up before writing a paper the way I tense before driving the car. I wonder if what looks to me like apathy is really just a thin screen covering a deep layer of fear.With each drive I make, I get a little better. Same with writing, of course—the more my students write, the better they get. But what about the interim? Do you feel your students are sometimes afraid of writing? What do you do to address this fear? ... View more

(Please note that the video discussed in this post contains violence and offensive language. Many of the comments left on YouTube are also offensive.) In thinking about a student's recent outburst  outburst at my school, I've considered what it says about students’ digital literacy, what it says about race, and what I would do in that situation. For this last post, I'd like to consider the student herself. There’s still a lot we don’t know. However, there are some things we do know. We know, for example, from the local CBC coverage: Just 24 hours earlier, a calm Carr was captured on CBS 4 helping to organize a bus trip to central Florida for a rally to support the family of Trayvon Martin the unarmed teenager who was shot to death allegedly by the head of the neighborhood Crime Watch. With this information, I am left thinking about students today. I think about the things they have to deal with that I never did, for example, privacy issues, violence, social pressures magnified through social media. I often say that each year I’m one year older but students are always eighteen. I usually feel it when I realize deflatedly that my cultural references fall flat in the classroom. Today I am realizing it on another, more disturbing, level. How do we build relations and connections to students today? How do I make my classroom the kind of place where a student can constructively relieve pressure? Any suggestions?   ... View more

I frequently refer to critical thinking in this blog and its crucial importance to writing instruction in particular and to education in general.  Of course, I am hardly alone in this commitment to critical thinking, but like everyone else I must use the term itself as if its definition was self-evident. But as important as critical thinking is to us all, it is rarely, if ever, actually defined. We tend to assume that we are all on the same page regarding its meaning, and go from there. But the fact is that the term critical thinking can mean different things to different people. Why? Because whatever critical thinking is, its significance is overdetermined and can be closely tied to the discipline and methodology of whoever is teaching it.  So I will describe here my own unified theory of critical thinking to see if I can locate some common ground between all of us who teach and practice it. First, I offer a concise definition of the term: Critical thinking is essentially a form of judgment, the weighing, assessing, and interpreting of ideas, information, and experience. It has become an especially cogent skill in an information age in which all of us, especially our students, are inundated with a constant stream of information that is increasingly difficult to sort out and assess, even for those of us for whom critical thinking is a more or less instinctive activity.  I use the word instinctive deliberately, because just as our ability to speak a language comes to us in a manner whose precise linguistic, grammatical, and semantic underpinnings may be invisible to us, so too may those of us who practice critical thinking all the time be unable to precisely state just what it is we are doing when we are thinking critically. Thus, the description of critical thinking that I mean to offer here is not intended to break any particularly new ground: I am really only trying to describe just what it is that we are already doing when we think critically. Before embarking on that description, it would be well to consider the existing paradigms that guide current university critical-thinking pedagogies. With critical-thinking pedagogy most commonly assigned to philosophy or composition departments, it is natural that the most common approaches to critical thinking involve logic, rhetoric, or some combination of the two. Since I am going to suggest that both rhetoric and logic are indeed components of critical thinking, it would be worth our while to look at each approach critically. Let’s begin with logic. In essence, logic constitutes a formal system whereby the truth or falsity of a proposition, inference, or statement can be assessed. Since critical thinking involves the assessment of propositions, inferences, and statements, there can be little doubt that the ability to think logically is an essential component of thinking critically. But logic cannot be the sole basis for critical thinking for many reasons. One is that while the rules of formal logic work within the formal system of logic, the real-world problems that we face are not so amenable to abstract logical rules. Now let’s look at rhetoric. Since critical thinking commonly leads to an expression of one’s judgments in the form of an argument (and virtually always does in university writing), it is essential that argumentative rhetoric be a part of an education in critical thinking. But once again, only a part, because argument does not constitute the formation of a judgment; it is the presentation of a judgment or interpretation, not that judgment itself.  A good argument includes the critical-thinking process that led to it, but the argument is secondary to an underlying critical assessment. There are two other candidates for a critical-thinking paradigm. The first is politics. Outside the academy, and at least arguably within it as well, critical thinking is sometimes believed to be equivalent to passing judgment on something on political grounds. While most of us would agree that making politics the sole ground for critical judgments is not a sound idea, it is also important not to dismiss the role that politics holds in the making of such judgments. Indeed, with the preponderance of social and cultural theory emphasizing the roles of politics and ideology in all social practice, it would not be wise to leave the political dimension of critical thinking out of the equation. Next, there is ethics, which more or less holds that critical judgments are essentially moral assessments of good and evil. This is probably the most widespread belief about critical thinking in the general population—understandably because of the moralistic foundations of our culture. But while judging whether something is good or bad may follow a critical judgment, it is not the ground for that judgment. To sum up: we can say that critical thinking involves logic, rhetoric, politics, and (at least potentially) ethics, but cannot be subsumed by any of them alone. Is there any way of pulling all these together? Yes, through the methodology of cultural semiotics, which usefully embraces all of them while prompting us to look at ideas, information, and experiences as signs: phenomena that bear cultural meanings beyond themselves. The usefulness of such an approach lies in its identifiability (cultural semiotics is a widely known field of study) and its versatility. Indeed, since from the semiotic perspective all human activity is composed of signs, there is no academic field that cannot be illuminated by it. A truly interdisciplinary approach, cultural semiotics can provide the kind of unified grounding in critical thinking that I believe we require. ... View more

(Please note that the video discussed in this post contains violence and offensive language. Many of the comments left on YouTube are also offensive.) When I watch the YouTube video of a student’s outburst at my school, there’s one question that I try to push to the edge of my mind: What would I have done if this occurred in a class that I was teaching? The worst incident I’ve ever experienced in a class happened during my first semester of teaching. One of my students called me Hitler and stormed out of class. Fortunately, that ended well and the student ended up doing great in the class. But what would I do if a student “went crazy”? At my school we actually have a flow chart—yes, a flow chart—on what to do under various circumstances: if a student seems depressed, if a student threatens violence, if a student disrupts class. But somehow that feels so woefully inadequate to me. Have you ever had a serious class disruption? How did you handle it? And how’s this for irony? Literally as I typed that sentence I got an e-mail from my department chair. Several of our teachers have now been asking what to do in such a situation. The answer, apparently, is call 911. School and violence are words too often coupled these days, as far as I am concerned. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what I would do in that moment. How about you?   ... View more

(Please note that the video discussed in this post contains violence and offensive language. Many of the comments left on YouTube are also offensive.) In part two of this series on the viral video of a student disrupting a class at my school, I’d like to address what the video can teach us, and our students, about race. Looking at the comments on the YouTube video is a potent place to start. What’s immediately apparent is that the comments focus nearly exclusively on race. Some are blatantly and disturbingly racist, using the “n” word in reference to the student. Others, though, make some attempt to unpack the racial issues in the incident. I love teaching Steve Olson’s essay “The End of Race,” in which he argues that race persists even though it no longer has any biological basis. Needless to say, this video and the comments surrounding it complicate Olson’s argument, while also bringing his seemingly abstract discussion into the very real world. I can imagine asking students to read through this conversation. I can imagine asking them to analyze the arguments being made—which ones are convincing? Who uses evidence? What counts as evidence? I can also imagine inviting them to contribute to the discussion, with civility. Basic to this discussion is the question of what racism is. That is, is racism limited to whites? Should it be expected from historically oppressed populations? Should it be accepted? What do we do about it? Here I am reminded of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essays "Making Conversation," and "The Primacy of Practice." One of Appiah’s basic arguments is simply that we need to find a way to live with others different from ourselves, simply because in the world today we are unavoidably surrounded by those different from ourselves. He calls this cosmopolitanism. I’m wondering if the video comments reflect that in action, or breaking down. ... View more

Thanks to interactive digital technology, it is now possible to appraise social attitudes and moods without having to conduct formal surveys or interviews. In fact, because of the combined effects of online anonymity and keyboard courage, the information we can gather simply by reading the comments appended to Internet news stories is likely to be more honest—if far more uncivil—than anything we could find through direct conversation. And since what happens in popular culture reflects to a significant degree the social ambience in which it appears, it’s useful to keep abreast of the online commentary wars when preparing to perform a cultural semiotic analysis. What has particularly caught my eye recently (I mean beyond the ubiquitous signs that the racial situation in this country is, to say the very least, fraught) is the inevitable response to every news story reporting on a Republican primary in which Ron Paul has failed to win another ballot. Even when Paul comes in at 5 to 7 percent of the vote, a number of people are bound to insist that he had obviously won the vote in a landslide and that once again the ballot had been tampered with by a ubiquitous double team of the Republican “oligarchy” and the “liberal media.” In short, the claim is consistently made that there is a conspiracy against Ron Paul. It is not my purpose here to discuss the candidacy of Ron Paul or his supporters. Rather, it is the prominent place that conspiracy theories hold in contemporary American culture. It isn’t that conspiracy theories are anything new—after all, the witch hunts of the McCarthyite 1950s were based on a conviction that there was a Communist conspiracy to take over the country—but that there is something different about today’s conspiracy theorists. And it is the difference within a semiotic system that indicates something significant. The difference lies in the lack of any clear ideology at work. When Bob Dylan could skewer the John Birch Society in his “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues,” conspiracy theory was a conspicuous possession of the far right. Whether it was Communists in the pantry or forged documents purporting an international cabal of “the Elders of Zion,” conspiracy theorists tended to be right-wing extremists. But while right-wing extremists continue to inhabit the house of the rising conspiracy (they still haven’t given up on “the New World Order” and its “black helicopters”), it is the ideologically incoherent conspiracy buffs who are the more apparent in popular culture—from the people who continue to scour the Mona Lisa for “clues,” to the “moon landing hoax” warriors who appear to spend their lives poring over every possible artifact of the Apollo era looking for “proof” that the United States never landed anyone on the moon. I used to assume that the moon landing hoax rumor began in some sort of Soviet era disinformation campaign, but I was wrong. Like the Roswell conspiracy confraternity, the lunar hoax crowd does not appear to hold any particular left-wing or anti-American ideology. Just as significantly, while traditional conspiracy theories constitute a kind of fun-house mirror-image distortion of religious convictions that nothing happens in human history without some sort of guiding hand behind it, the lunar hoax theorists are out to prove that something didn’t happen, not that what did happen had a malign intent behind it. Searching for an abductive (that is, most likely) solution to the significance of the new conspiracy theory regime, I find a common ground in a shared distrust of, and opposition to, all forms of official authority and power. With its origins in the disillusionments of the Vietnam War era, this is a ground that can be shared by the Left, the Right, and the ideologically uncommitted alike. Add to this the fact that in the Information Age it is enormously easier for people to gain access to information that indeed can, at least at times, reveal the ways in which official power really can lie to us and cover its tracks (the fact that Colin Powell eventually went public with what he really knew about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction sure hasn’t done official authority any good recently, not to mention Wikileaks) and you have a recipe for mistrust and paranoia: fertile ground for the conspiracy theorist. ... View more

(Please note that the video discussed in this post contains violence and offensive language. Many of the comments left on YouTube are also offensive.) This past Tuesday, as I was getting ready to fly out to St. Louis for the Conference on College Composition and Communication, as I was polishing my talk on students reading and writing in New Media, a disturbing example of students’ digital literacies at my school went viral. During a discussion of peacocks in a class on evolution, one of the students became disruptive and violent. In a powerful example of unofficial digital literacies, several students used their cell phones to capture the incident, which ended up on YouTube. As of this writing, the video has had over 195,000 views, and the entire incident has moved from student/citizen journalism to various online and mainstream news outlets. There is so much packed into this incident that I’d like to dedicate a series of posts to it. I think it has that much to say. More importantly, I think we have that much to learn from it. For starters, given the subject of my talk, I’d like to think about this in terms of digital literacy.  We live in a world not just of surveillance, with cameras watching us all the time and with Google or Facebook knowing everything about us, but of sousvelliance. The term comes from  “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments.” In the article, authors Steve Mann, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman define the term: One way to challenge and problematize both surveillance and acquiescence to it is to resituate these technologies of control on individuals, offering panoptic technologies to help them observe those in authority. We call this inverse panopticon “sousveillance” from the French words for “sous” (below) and “veiller” to watch. (332) Sousveillance participates in what Mann calls reflectionism: “a philosophy and procedures of using technology to mirror and confront bureaucratic organizations. Reflectionism holds up the mirror and asks the question: ‘Do you like what you see?’ If you do not, then you will know that other approaches by which we integrate society and technology must be considered” (333).  Rather than regulate mechanisms of surveillance, reflectionism aims to increase the equality between the “surveiller” and the “surveilled” (333). Generally, I am drawn to this concept of sousvelliance, both as an individual and as a teacher. But in this case my reaction is complicated. On the one hand, having students document what actually happened in the class feels important—for the teacher, for my school, for the public, for the students. On the other hand, it makes me wonder if sousvelliance is a remedy to panopticism or an extension of it. I don’t have an answer for this one. I'll continue to work through my thoughts on what happened as I finish up these posts, but for now I’d love your help and insight. What’s the effect of having this video on YouTube? Is this student digital literacy? Is this another kind of surveillance in a world that seems to have little privacy? More simply, let me ask you: should this video exist? ... View more

I’ve been working on a paper for the NEXUS conference at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville. In a section my paper I consider the ethics of teaching technologies such as Blackboard and, in particular, their “panoptic” potential.  I try to avoid Blackboard whenever possible for a variety of reasons, but this same panopticism is sitting inside Microsoft Word when I grade electronically: I can see when a student last worked on a paper, how they formatted it (double-spaced or just a little extra to make the length?), and even how they revised (using Compare Documents with any earlier draft). The question I ask in the paper is one I pose to you, too: what are the ethical implications when we can see inside students’ composing processes? Any thoughts? ... View more

Rush Limbaugh's notorious screed against Sandra Fluke (the precise terms of which I have no intention of compounding by repeating here) offers a striking signifier of the way in which politics and entertainment have become enmeshed within what I call America's entertainment culture. For beyond the appalling personal attack, misogynistic undertones, and apparent display of medical ignorance, what this story reveals is what can happen when entertainers, who traditionally have been governed by a behavioral code that is looser than the codes that govern politicians, become political leaders in their own right. The political rise of entertainers—as entertainers, rather than as performers who choose to enter electoral politics like Ronald Reagan and Al Franken—has been unfolding ever since talk radio emerged as a political force some decades ago. Statistically, but not wholly, a phenomenon of the right, talk radio and its televised offspring have produced such voices as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, men who have never held political office themselves but who wield considerable power, as evidenced by conservative pundit George Will's remark that in the wake of Limbaugh's breach of common decency few Republicans appeared to have the courage to seriously condemn it. Senator Joseph McCarthy once had this sort of power, too, but it is hard to think of any contemporary elected official who does. And it is significant that Limbaugh's two "apologies" for his comments came only after a group of sponsors withdrew from his program: answering to no voters, the political entertainer must still answer to the marketplace in a hypercapitalist society. As I write these words, the Limbaugh story is still news. Women legislators are still proposing legislation to prohibit health insurance coverage for Viagra in a rather deft response to Limbaugh's rant, while Limbaugh himself declares victory because his audience numbers remain high. I will be surprised if his show is yanked from the airwaves (the audience-market is king in a hypercapitalistic entertainment culture), but I suppose that it is always possible. It will be an interesting story to watch. But perhaps the main point of the whole sorry episode is its revelation of the cost to democratic government that entertainment-driven politics can incur. Answering to audiences, who are entertained by smutty humor and shock-jock confrontational politics, rather than to voters, the entertainer-demagogue has nothing to hold him- or herself back.  The result is ever-increasing polarization and an ever-descending trajectory of social discourse. Politics as smackdown and soap opera. "Anyway," as political comedian Mort Sahl likes to say, "onward." ... View more