Things that go bump in the night...
"From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night, Dear Lord, preserve us!"
My mother has a sampler with that saying. It caught my attention when I was a child, and it's stayed with me all these years.
Things went "BUMP IN THE NIGHT" last night! I've been having trouble sleeping and had managed to block out all the little aches and pains, and was sound asleep when there was a knock on our bedroom door. It was 3:00 in the morning. I assumed that Second Son had knocked to tell me that Elegant Mother was in distress. I managed to unwind myself from the nest of covers and ran for the door.
The lights were on in the foyer, and I could hear voices as I approached. I'd left the bedroom in such a hurry that I was in my nightie and had left my glasses behind. EM and SS were standing there talking to two policemen! Let me tell you, when you've just been rousted out of bed in the middle of the night, those guys can look really fierce!
They explained that the police had received a 911 call from our address, and when they responded, all they could hear was static. Yesterday the phone company had worked on two of our three telephone lines. Elegante Mother's phone was still misbehaving. The police asked if our phones had been worked on, and when I replied, "Yes," they nodded knowingly and prepared to leave.
Second Son said this morning that he was surprised that they didn't ask to check the house to be sure that no one was being held against their will. I guess we all looked properly sleepy enough to convince them that we were victims of a technology malfunction.
This morning, I called the phone company to ask for a repair call, and told the customer service rep about our early morning visit. She asked if we had any wireless phones in the house. Elegante Mother has a base phone, with a wireless. From what the representative said, wireless phones can send out that 911 call! I had no idea that was possible.
I guess this happens often enough that the police can just about guess what has happened, but they still have to follow up on the call. We wouldn't want someone who needs assistance to go without because someone thought their call was just a phone malfunction.
Our visitors came in separate cars. They used their flashlights to look around as they came up the sidewalk. and then they rang the doorbell, THREE TIMES! I never heard it. In fact, I was so deeply asleep that I didn't hear the knock on the bedroom door. Dear Husband had to wake me. We're lucky that Second Son woke up and realized that no one else heard the bell, or the police might have tried to break the door down.
Well....all's well that ends well. We all got to go back to sleep for a couple of hours, and there was no ticket or fine for the false call. I guess in the future things had better go BUMP louder! And, maybe it's time to keep my robe by the bed! *G*
Monday, February 25, 2008
Reader Response Homework 02/26-02/27
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When my oldest son was two, we lived in an old cabin high up in the mountains. Our cabin was said to have been an old railroad line cabin used during the hey days of the mining town up the road. My mother in-law had somewhat renovated the cabin into a summer-fall home for the ranch we were working on. My husband was quite fond of this place, and I was just a bit paranoid about the place, because of a few things which were taking place in the cabin.
There were foot steps running up and down stairs when nobody was there, televisions coming on by themselves, without the cord being plugged into the sockets, women speaking in very fast paced quiet language, which you could hear but not understand, horses outside the cabin being spooked by things which couldn't be seen, and many more unearthly, unexplainable things which went bump not only in the night but almost any given day. I was and still am a little uneasy about this cabin.
When my son was two years old, we had placed him in a middle bedroom of this cabin. He was tired and fell quickly and soundly asleep. He had been playing all day. It was late, so my husband, and myself also went to bed in the next bedroom. It was about three in the morning, when both my husband, and myself were awakened by the high pitched screaming of my son. He was terrified. My husband and I both jumped out of bed and went directly to my son's room. He was lying in his bed, eyes shining in terror, covered tightly up to his neck in blankets, which also had been tucked tightly into the sides and end of his bed. I looked at my husband in astonishment, and asked "who covered him like this?" He was as amazed as I was. My son looked at us, and screamed "Ollie did". I undid the blankets from my son, and carried him to bed with me.
Over the years since that time, we have been visited by many more spirits from the realm of death. Our friends have seen door handles turn and doors open up and close by themselves. They too have heard the voices of women chattering throughout the cabin, footsteps running up and down invisible stairs, and once in awhile an occasional visit from an apparition of an older gentleman, who comes from a mist of bluish silver air, and disappears into this mist of air. They have heard a phone, long ago disconnected ring, and when answered a static comes through on the line.
We have had sightings of children dressed in early 20th century garb visit our home site, and have even had one little spirit girl chase some of our children from behind a bike, only to disappear into nothingness in front of my brother in-laws wide eyes. This scared him so bad, that he gathered the children and bikes up, threw them into the back of his truck, and took off up the street without finishing a fence line he was doing. He by the way never believed in ghosts until that day.
Several of our visiting friends, have had their feet played with at night while sleeping. They have also had their clothes neatly folded and placed at the foot of their beds. My dogs have stood in corners and barked for no apparent reason, sometimes while cocking their heads from one side to the other as though looking at someone.
My brave beagle has hi-tailed or should I say placed her tail between her legs, and cowardly run quickly from the back of the cabin and into another room, hidden under the bed, and growled when coaxed to come out. We have been locked into rooms, with the door held and no one on the other side. Felt several areas of cold spots, been jumped upon by what feels like another body while in bed, had hands run up and down our backs, had our names called and poked in the back with a finger.
The cabin has had another resident who lived in it before us. She was the 93 year old lady up town. When I asked her to please come visit me in the cabin, she shook her head no over and over again, and said she would never come down because the place was haunted. She said she was always being haunted when she lived in it years ago, as was her family.
Even though the cabin is haunted, I like it, but you will never see me staying there by myself. I really don't like people who show up unannounced. By the way Ollie was my grandmothers great aunt who had passed away long before my dad or even I was born. I didn't know anything about her until a couple of years ago when my dad was telling us about his relatives, and her name came up. My son is now 28, and I am older but a better believer of things that go bump in the night
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When my oldest son was two, we lived in an old cabin high up in the mountains. Our cabin was said to have been an old railroad line cabin used during the hey days of the mining town up the road. My mother in-law had somewhat renovated the cabin into a summer-fall home for the ranch we were working on. My husband was quite fond of this place, and I was just a bit paranoid about the place, because of a few things which were taking place in the cabin.
There were foot steps running up and down stairs when nobody was there, televisions coming on by themselves, without the cord being plugged into the sockets, women speaking in very fast paced quiet language, which you could hear but not understand, horses outside the cabin being spooked by things which couldn't be seen, and many more unearthly, unexplainable things which went bump not only in the night but almost any given day. I was and still am a little uneasy about this cabin.
When my son was two years old, we had placed him in a middle bedroom of this cabin. He was tired and fell quickly and soundly asleep. He had been playing all day. It was late, so my husband, and myself also went to bed in the next bedroom. It was about three in the morning, when both my husband, and myself were awakened by the high pitched screaming of my son. He was terrified. My husband and I both jumped out of bed and went directly to my son's room. He was lying in his bed, eyes shining in terror, covered tightly up to his neck in blankets, which also had been tucked tightly into the sides and end of his bed. I looked at my husband in astonishment, and asked "who covered him like this?" He was as amazed as I was. My son looked at us, and screamed "Ollie did". I undid the blankets from my son, and carried him to bed with me.
Over the years since that time, we have been visited by many more spirits from the realm of death. Our friends have seen door handles turn and doors open up and close by themselves. They too have heard the voices of women chattering throughout the cabin, footsteps running up and down invisible stairs, and once in awhile an occasional visit from an apparition of an older gentleman, who comes from a mist of bluish silver air, and disappears into this mist of air. They have heard a phone, long ago disconnected ring, and when answered a static comes through on the line.
We have had sightings of children dressed in early 20th century garb visit our home site, and have even had one little spirit girl chase some of our children from behind a bike, only to disappear into nothingness in front of my brother in-laws wide eyes. This scared him so bad, that he gathered the children and bikes up, threw them into the back of his truck, and took off up the street without finishing a fence line he was doing. He by the way never believed in ghosts until that day.
Several of our visiting friends, have had their feet played with at night while sleeping. They have also had their clothes neatly folded and placed at the foot of their beds. My dogs have stood in corners and barked for no apparent reason, sometimes while cocking their heads from one side to the other as though looking at someone.
My brave beagle has hi-tailed or should I say placed her tail between her legs, and cowardly run quickly from the back of the cabin and into another room, hidden under the bed, and growled when coaxed to come out. We have been locked into rooms, with the door held and no one on the other side. Felt several areas of cold spots, been jumped upon by what feels like another body while in bed, had hands run up and down our backs, had our names called and poked in the back with a finger.
The cabin has had another resident who lived in it before us. She was the 93 year old lady up town. When I asked her to please come visit me in the cabin, she shook her head no over and over again, and said she would never come down because the place was haunted. She said she was always being haunted when she lived in it years ago, as was her family.
Even though the cabin is haunted, I like it, but you will never see me staying there by myself. I really don't like people who show up unannounced. By the way Ollie was my grandmothers great aunt who had passed away long before my dad or even I was born. I didn't know anything about her until a couple of years ago when my dad was telling us about his relatives, and her name came up. My son is now 28, and I am older but a better believer of things that go bump in the night
Reader Response Homework 2/25/08
Students in periods 2 and 6 are asked to watch the Film A Raisin In the Sun. After watching the film students are asked to respond to the film in an evaluative way. Meaning I essentially want you the viewer to make connections by asking yourself questions such as: Is this film interesting? Was this film well written? Was it worth watching? Students are also asked to evaluate the characters in the film. Pick out the major and minor characters, and talk about their roles in this film. I also want you to come up with the theme for this play.
Your are also asked to read this poem and discuss it with someone in your house. I want to know how does this poem relate to the overall them of the film. Last, your are asked to come up with three responses from the fill. Support your responses with quotes.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode
Your are also asked to read this poem and discuss it with someone in your house. I want to know how does this poem relate to the overall them of the film. Last, your are asked to come up with three responses from the fill. Support your responses with quotes.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Reader Response Homework 2/20-2/21
For homework students are asked to listen to this thought provoking rhetorical speech and comment on the words, images, thoughts, laws, and circumstances driving Malcolm X's speech..
Friday, February 15, 2008
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Mad Libs Extra Credit Grammar Games
10 points per mad lib, print or email to me at afa0882@lausd.net
Preview of Persuasive Essays
Formal Essay Assignments
Essay 1:
Write a newspaper column, op-ed piece, or article for a specified newsletter arguing a topic of interest to your interest.
Essay 2:
Write an argumentative essay about some aspect of the "media" (television, radio, print media, electronic media, etc.) which you find interesting.
Essay 3:
Write an argumentative essay about a topic of your choice. Use at least three sources, citing them parenthetically in the text, and include a list of "Works Cited" following MLA format. Length should be a minimum of three full pages (typed, double-spaced). Maximum length should be six pages.
Essay 4:
Write an argumentative essay about a topic of your choice. Your main claim (i.e., thesis) can be any of the three types (fact, value, policy), but you should incorporate appeals to needs and values somewhere in your essay. Use at least three sources, two of which should be current magazine, journal, or newspaper articles; cite uses of your sources parenthetically in the text, and include a list of "Works Cited." Include all of this with every draft, including the first. Failure to cite your sources in your first draft will result in your not receiving credit for that draft on the day it is due.
The minimum length of your text (not including your Works Cited page) is four typed, double-spaced pages, with an upper maximum of about six pages. The first draft is due in class on Tuesday, March 26 for peer critique; the second draft, along with three peer critiques and a typed first draft, will be due in class on Thursday, March 21. I will not accept any essays lacking any of these things. Any late papers (including those returned to students for failing to turn in all required materials) will be penalized on your daily work grade.
Remember, each successive draft of an essay should constitute a substantive change (i.e., REVISION) over the previous draft. Revision includes more than simply changing a few words and/or grammar errors. If your second draft is substantially the same essay as the first draft, I will return it to you for further revision and you will be penalized on your daily work grade accordingly.
Essay 5:
Write an argumentative essay similar to Essays 4 and 5, but this time your topic should pertain to some aspect of the future. While it is not necessary that you speculate or try to predict the future, the essay should somehow look toward the future.
The minimum length of your text (not including your Works Cited page) is four typed, double-spaced pages, with an upper maximum of about six pages. The first draft is due in class on Thursday, April 11, for peer critique; the second draft, along with three peer critiques and a typed first draft, will be due in class on Tuesday, April 16. I will not accept any essays lacking any of these things. Any late papers (including those returned to students for failing to turn in all required materials) will be penalized on your daily work grade.
Remember, each successive draft of an essay should constitute a substantive change (i.e., REVISION) over the previous draft. Revision includes more than simply changing a few words and/or grammar errors. If your second draft is substantially the same essay as the first draft, I will return it to you for further revision and you will be penalized on your daily work grade accordingly.
Essay 1:
Write a newspaper column, op-ed piece, or article for a specified newsletter arguing a topic of interest to your interest.
Essay 2:
Write an argumentative essay about some aspect of the "media" (television, radio, print media, electronic media, etc.) which you find interesting.
Essay 3:
Write an argumentative essay about a topic of your choice. Use at least three sources, citing them parenthetically in the text, and include a list of "Works Cited" following MLA format. Length should be a minimum of three full pages (typed, double-spaced). Maximum length should be six pages.
Essay 4:
Write an argumentative essay about a topic of your choice. Your main claim (i.e., thesis) can be any of the three types (fact, value, policy), but you should incorporate appeals to needs and values somewhere in your essay. Use at least three sources, two of which should be current magazine, journal, or newspaper articles; cite uses of your sources parenthetically in the text, and include a list of "Works Cited." Include all of this with every draft, including the first. Failure to cite your sources in your first draft will result in your not receiving credit for that draft on the day it is due.
The minimum length of your text (not including your Works Cited page) is four typed, double-spaced pages, with an upper maximum of about six pages. The first draft is due in class on Tuesday, March 26 for peer critique; the second draft, along with three peer critiques and a typed first draft, will be due in class on Thursday, March 21. I will not accept any essays lacking any of these things. Any late papers (including those returned to students for failing to turn in all required materials) will be penalized on your daily work grade.
Remember, each successive draft of an essay should constitute a substantive change (i.e., REVISION) over the previous draft. Revision includes more than simply changing a few words and/or grammar errors. If your second draft is substantially the same essay as the first draft, I will return it to you for further revision and you will be penalized on your daily work grade accordingly.
Essay 5:
Write an argumentative essay similar to Essays 4 and 5, but this time your topic should pertain to some aspect of the future. While it is not necessary that you speculate or try to predict the future, the essay should somehow look toward the future.
The minimum length of your text (not including your Works Cited page) is four typed, double-spaced pages, with an upper maximum of about six pages. The first draft is due in class on Thursday, April 11, for peer critique; the second draft, along with three peer critiques and a typed first draft, will be due in class on Tuesday, April 16. I will not accept any essays lacking any of these things. Any late papers (including those returned to students for failing to turn in all required materials) will be penalized on your daily work grade.
Remember, each successive draft of an essay should constitute a substantive change (i.e., REVISION) over the previous draft. Revision includes more than simply changing a few words and/or grammar errors. If your second draft is substantially the same essay as the first draft, I will return it to you for further revision and you will be penalized on your daily work grade accordingly.
Extra Credit (Who should survive?)
Who Should Survive?
A severe storm has crippled a small ship, the S.S. Guppy, and the only remaining lifeboat has room for only seven people. You have no hope of reaching civilization, but there's a fairly good chance that you can make it to one of many small, uncharted, and unpopulated islands in the area. You may have to remain on such an island for years. Your task is to choose which seven people should be allowed on the lifeboat, and hence, be allowed to survive.
Dr. Dane: thirty-seven, white, no religious affiliation, Ph.D. in history, college professor, in good health (jogs daily), hobby is botany, enjoys politics, married with one child (Bobby).
Mrs. Dane: thirty-eight, white, Jewish, rather obese, diabetic, M.A. in psychology, counselor in a mental health clinic, married to Dr. Dane, has one child.
Bobby: ten, white, Jewish, mentally retarded with IQ of 70.
Mrs. Garcia: twenty-three, Spanish-American, Catholic, ninth-grade education, cocktail waitress, worked as a prostitute, married at age sixteen, divorced at age eighteen.
Jean Garcia: three months old, Spanish-American, healthy.
Mary Evans: eighteen, black, Protestant, trade school education, wears glasses, artistic.
Mr. Newton: twenty-five, black power advocate, starting last year of medical school, suspected homosexual activity, music as a hobby, physical fitness nut.
Mrs. Clark: twenty-eight, black, Protestant, daughter of a minister, college graduate, electronics engineer, single now after a brief marriage, member of Zero Population.
Mr. Blake: fifty-one, white, Mormon, B.S. in mechanics, married with four children, enjoys outdoors, much experience in construction, quite handy, sympathizes with anti-black views.
Father Frans: thirty-seven, white, Catholic, priest, active in civil rights, former college athlete, farming background, often criticized for liberal views.
Dr. Gonzales: sixty-six, Spanish-American, Catholic, doctor in general practice, two heart attacks in the past five years, loves literature and quotes extensively.
A severe storm has crippled a small ship, the S.S. Guppy, and the only remaining lifeboat has room for only seven people. You have no hope of reaching civilization, but there's a fairly good chance that you can make it to one of many small, uncharted, and unpopulated islands in the area. You may have to remain on such an island for years. Your task is to choose which seven people should be allowed on the lifeboat, and hence, be allowed to survive.
Dr. Dane: thirty-seven, white, no religious affiliation, Ph.D. in history, college professor, in good health (jogs daily), hobby is botany, enjoys politics, married with one child (Bobby).
Mrs. Dane: thirty-eight, white, Jewish, rather obese, diabetic, M.A. in psychology, counselor in a mental health clinic, married to Dr. Dane, has one child.
Bobby: ten, white, Jewish, mentally retarded with IQ of 70.
Mrs. Garcia: twenty-three, Spanish-American, Catholic, ninth-grade education, cocktail waitress, worked as a prostitute, married at age sixteen, divorced at age eighteen.
Jean Garcia: three months old, Spanish-American, healthy.
Mary Evans: eighteen, black, Protestant, trade school education, wears glasses, artistic.
Mr. Newton: twenty-five, black power advocate, starting last year of medical school, suspected homosexual activity, music as a hobby, physical fitness nut.
Mrs. Clark: twenty-eight, black, Protestant, daughter of a minister, college graduate, electronics engineer, single now after a brief marriage, member of Zero Population.
Mr. Blake: fifty-one, white, Mormon, B.S. in mechanics, married with four children, enjoys outdoors, much experience in construction, quite handy, sympathizes with anti-black views.
Father Frans: thirty-seven, white, Catholic, priest, active in civil rights, former college athlete, farming background, often criticized for liberal views.
Dr. Gonzales: sixty-six, Spanish-American, Catholic, doctor in general practice, two heart attacks in the past five years, loves literature and quotes extensively.
Using Sources
Using Sources
One of the fundamental skills emphasized in this class is the ability to use outside sources in writing an argumentative essay.
This lesson will teach you some of the basic principles about how to use sources in your own writing; at the end is an exercise testing your abilities.
Basic Principles for Using Documented Sources
Student writers should learn to use sources as evidence, as specific examples that support their generalizations. Poorly written research papers are often characterized by over-use of sources strung together in an attempt to let the sources write the paper.
Student writers should learn to introduce sources, providing smooth transitions between the writer's own words and the words of others.
Students should learn to paraphrase, to summarize, and to quote and to use each method of citation appropriately.
To paraphrase, writers use their own words to restate the ideas of the original source. The paraphrase changes word choice and sentence structure but maintains the approximate length of the original.
To summarize, writers condense the source, restating only the main ideas--usually by paraphrasing. Summaries are always much shorter than the original source.
To quote, writers preserve the exact words, punctuation, and capitalization, and even the errors, of the source.
In practice, writers nearly always mix all three methods of citation. In order to summarize a paragraph, a writer may paraphrase the topic sentence but choose to retain, in quotes, the source's most vivid word choice.
Sources cited in this lesson are as follows:
Hodges, John C., Winifred Bryan Horner, Suzanne Strobeck Webb, and Robert Keith Miller. The Harbrace College Handbook. Twelfth Edition. Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
Silverman, Jay, Elaine Hughes, and Diana Roberts Wienbroer. Rules of Thumb: A Guide for Writers. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990.
One of the fundamental skills emphasized in this class is the ability to use outside sources in writing an argumentative essay.
This lesson will teach you some of the basic principles about how to use sources in your own writing; at the end is an exercise testing your abilities.
Basic Principles for Using Documented Sources
Student writers should learn to use sources as evidence, as specific examples that support their generalizations. Poorly written research papers are often characterized by over-use of sources strung together in an attempt to let the sources write the paper.
Student writers should learn to introduce sources, providing smooth transitions between the writer's own words and the words of others.
Students should learn to paraphrase, to summarize, and to quote and to use each method of citation appropriately.
To paraphrase, writers use their own words to restate the ideas of the original source. The paraphrase changes word choice and sentence structure but maintains the approximate length of the original.
To summarize, writers condense the source, restating only the main ideas--usually by paraphrasing. Summaries are always much shorter than the original source.
To quote, writers preserve the exact words, punctuation, and capitalization, and even the errors, of the source.
In practice, writers nearly always mix all three methods of citation. In order to summarize a paragraph, a writer may paraphrase the topic sentence but choose to retain, in quotes, the source's most vivid word choice.
Sources cited in this lesson are as follows:
Hodges, John C., Winifred Bryan Horner, Suzanne Strobeck Webb, and Robert Keith Miller. The Harbrace College Handbook. Twelfth Edition. Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
Silverman, Jay, Elaine Hughes, and Diana Roberts Wienbroer. Rules of Thumb: A Guide for Writers. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990.
Reader Response Sheet
Reader Response Questions
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What is the essay's title?
How appropriate is the title for the subject matter in the essay? Does it make you want to read the essay?
For what audience does the essay seem intended? Has the writer set up a good rationale for the essay? Has the writer narrowed the essay's topic sufficiently? How meaningful and insightful is this essay going to be to the intended audience?
What is the essay's chief claim? Is it stated explicitly, or is it implied? Is it clear and concise?
Summarize at least three ways the writer attempts to support this claim, and describe its effectiveness. What types of support does the writer use? How might each kind of support be improved?
What one point does the writer most need to develop further? How would you recommend the writer make it better?
Comment on the essay's introduction and conclusion. How well does the introduction set up the essay? Does it make you want to read further? How can the writer improve the introduction? How well does the conclusion end the essay? Does it avoid restating the obvious? Does it shed some concluding insight into the writer's thoughts on the subject?
Point out any places in the essay where the words or phrasing seemed lackluster, awkward, confusing, or otherwise ineffective. (Quote the offending phrases, and say why they are weak.)
Does the writer effectively introduce and incorporate sources? Are there any quotations in which the writer does not name the source and explain who the source is (i.e., why the source is being quoted)? Are there any quotations that are not introduced? Is it clear when the writer's use of sources begins?
Does the writer cite page numbers of where he or she found a source (in parentheses following the citation)? For example: Calvin has said, "Tigers can be friendly creatures" (26).
Describe the writer's voice in this essay. How would you characterize the writer's attitude as presented in the essay? Will the writer's attitude offend the intended audience? Has the writer avoided "slanting" his or her language? Does the writer use clichés? Might any of the words used in the essays needlessly offend a significant portion of readers?
After reading the essay, what single element in the essay most stands out in your memory? Why? Does it stand out because it helps or hurts the essay?
In which of the following areas is the essay particularly well done? (Check all that apply)
Excellent organization of material; ideas flow from sentence to sentence and from paragraph to paragraph smoothly and logically
Informative, vivid details; not a bunch of abstractions
Well-unified paragraphs
An excellent use of sources to back up the writer's ideas
Lively, vivid words and phrases
A logical, convincing argument
A good, narrow focus, with all pertinent points covered in the essay; did not oversimplify or needlessly convolute the issues
In which of the following areas does the essay need work? (Un-check all that do not apply.)
Sloppy, confusing, or hard to follow organization; sentences and paragraphs do not always flow logically or smoothly
Few vivid details; difficult to understand or to visualize the issues
Some paragraphs poorly unified; ideas do not seem to fit together
Sources are not used well; too much quoting, not enough summarizing or paraphrasing; paper seems like a series of quotes "strung together"
Dull or confusing language; words, phrases, and sentences sometimes don't make sense
Argument is not convincing; some relevant issues are not addressed in the essay; essay does not address opposition to the argument
Essay topic too broad; tries to cover too much
Write a brief personal note to the writer, summarizing your overall view of the essay and how well it works for the intended audience. Include any suggestions on how it could be improved.
What is your overall impression of this essay?
Excellent: the best essay I've ever read by another student
Pretty good: it kept my attention throughout
So-so: it wasn't really, really bad, but it wasn't very good either
Not too good: it needs a lot of revising
Very bad. The writer ought to start over on this one
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What is the essay's title?
How appropriate is the title for the subject matter in the essay? Does it make you want to read the essay?
For what audience does the essay seem intended? Has the writer set up a good rationale for the essay? Has the writer narrowed the essay's topic sufficiently? How meaningful and insightful is this essay going to be to the intended audience?
What is the essay's chief claim? Is it stated explicitly, or is it implied? Is it clear and concise?
Summarize at least three ways the writer attempts to support this claim, and describe its effectiveness. What types of support does the writer use? How might each kind of support be improved?
What one point does the writer most need to develop further? How would you recommend the writer make it better?
Comment on the essay's introduction and conclusion. How well does the introduction set up the essay? Does it make you want to read further? How can the writer improve the introduction? How well does the conclusion end the essay? Does it avoid restating the obvious? Does it shed some concluding insight into the writer's thoughts on the subject?
Point out any places in the essay where the words or phrasing seemed lackluster, awkward, confusing, or otherwise ineffective. (Quote the offending phrases, and say why they are weak.)
Does the writer effectively introduce and incorporate sources? Are there any quotations in which the writer does not name the source and explain who the source is (i.e., why the source is being quoted)? Are there any quotations that are not introduced? Is it clear when the writer's use of sources begins?
Does the writer cite page numbers of where he or she found a source (in parentheses following the citation)? For example: Calvin has said, "Tigers can be friendly creatures" (26).
Describe the writer's voice in this essay. How would you characterize the writer's attitude as presented in the essay? Will the writer's attitude offend the intended audience? Has the writer avoided "slanting" his or her language? Does the writer use clichés? Might any of the words used in the essays needlessly offend a significant portion of readers?
After reading the essay, what single element in the essay most stands out in your memory? Why? Does it stand out because it helps or hurts the essay?
In which of the following areas is the essay particularly well done? (Check all that apply)
Excellent organization of material; ideas flow from sentence to sentence and from paragraph to paragraph smoothly and logically
Informative, vivid details; not a bunch of abstractions
Well-unified paragraphs
An excellent use of sources to back up the writer's ideas
Lively, vivid words and phrases
A logical, convincing argument
A good, narrow focus, with all pertinent points covered in the essay; did not oversimplify or needlessly convolute the issues
In which of the following areas does the essay need work? (Un-check all that do not apply.)
Sloppy, confusing, or hard to follow organization; sentences and paragraphs do not always flow logically or smoothly
Few vivid details; difficult to understand or to visualize the issues
Some paragraphs poorly unified; ideas do not seem to fit together
Sources are not used well; too much quoting, not enough summarizing or paraphrasing; paper seems like a series of quotes "strung together"
Dull or confusing language; words, phrases, and sentences sometimes don't make sense
Argument is not convincing; some relevant issues are not addressed in the essay; essay does not address opposition to the argument
Essay topic too broad; tries to cover too much
Write a brief personal note to the writer, summarizing your overall view of the essay and how well it works for the intended audience. Include any suggestions on how it could be improved.
What is your overall impression of this essay?
Excellent: the best essay I've ever read by another student
Pretty good: it kept my attention throughout
So-so: it wasn't really, really bad, but it wasn't very good either
Not too good: it needs a lot of revising
Very bad. The writer ought to start over on this one
Reader Response Homework
Limbaugh, Letterman and Bill Clinton:
THE POLITICS OF IRONY
By Alex Ross
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The intellectual human being must choose between irony and radicalism; a third choice is not decently possible.
--Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Television began with a man sitting at a desk, talking. The desk, at first, was a matter of necessity--early T.V. cameras were massive and immobile, so their subjects needed a visual motive for staying put. Journalists were cast as "anchors," and entertainers as "hosts," each installed at desks or desklike areas. Perhaps there were deeper psycho-historical origins: Roosevelt had ruled the nation from an infirm patrician's seat. In any case, desks have now become indispensable. They impart an executive bearing to the sitters, who make completely spurious note-taking motions when the camera cuts away to a commercial. Anyone on television capable of taking notes has an edge on the average viewer.
Fresh waves of technology and fashion should have put this antique format out of circulation. But the desks are more numerous than ever, especially after 11 p.m. At a time when television is dissolving into subculturally specialized, aesthetically disheveled fragments, the late-night host somehow has held on to iconic status--trumpeted by network publicity, debated in workplaces, dissected in reams of articles such as this one. It is as if he (and it is still universally a he) has become a critical common referent in a hopelessly uncentered culture. Addressing a public of infinitely malleable size, creating events from thin air, the host is asked to engineer the illusive unities, bridging gaps that our politicians long have been unable to navigate.
How does a host address a nation of subcultures? The one subject known to us all is television itself--its rules, its rhetoric, its accumulated history and literature. And so the common language has been an ironic subversion of television itself: the most popular shows on T.V. right now are about T.V.-- "Murphy Brown," "Home Improvement" and (fitfully) "Seinfeld," to name three top contenders. Others, such as "Roseanne," "Married ... With Children" and "The Simpsons," invert the model family shows of T.V.'s past. Self-referential irony, thought to be the annoying trivium of the 1980s, has settled in for the long haul.
Through this haze, the hosts have stumbled on what might be called the politics of irony. They who grasp it wield strong cultural-political clout. While the vast following that upheld Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" is gone forever, the more narrow but intense regard for a David Letterman or a Rush Limbaugh has no less weight. The new host is a sly virtuoso of layered meanings, a contrapuntalist of revealed and concealed messages. The new kind of host is also--critically--not a liberal. Earnest, Clintonian liberalism so far has floundered in the new conditions. Conservatives, it turns out, know their T.V. better.
But first, some talk-show history. The original hosts were nationally syndicated gossip columnists, hired by radio to simulate glamour for 1930s audiences. Walter Winchell, of the Daily Mirror, won fame second to none simply by sitting at his table at the Stork Club, gathering gossip for his monologues. Celebrities came to pay homage, and he would report their quips and exploits alongside questionable stories from all sources--thus an atmosphere of "guests" circulating around him. One-third of the nation watched in fascination as he became a figure of national importance, preaching a blend of gung-ho patriotism and gangsterish apathy. FDR and J. Edgar Hoover were both in his debt. He stamped himself on the flow of events around him with an array of stylistic tics: the spastic, gibberish-flavored prose style; the much-imitated triple-dot punctuation; the grand salutation to "Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea." He was vainglorious, nasty, vague, central.
Louella Parsons, columnist for the all-powerful Hearst newspapers and host of "Hollywood Hotel," was no less potent; she too boosted Hoover, although entertainment remained her primary interest. She is best remembered for two interventions she made in the careers of performers entering film from radio: the destruction of Orson Welles, whose debut film Citizen Kane unwisely attacked Hearst head-on, and the elevation of Ronald Reagan, who was lucky enough to come from her hometown of Dixon, Illinois. Parsons promoted Reagan at the outset of his career, finding him a bit role in the 1937 film version of Hollywood Hotel.
Parsons never made it to television, and Winchell's attempt at a show in the '50s failed miserably. The most popular hosts in the new medium were far less tendentious and imposing. Arthur Godfrey hosted folksy chat shows with titles like "Arthur Godfrey and His Friends," drawing audiences of up to 80 million people. Ed Sullivan carried a variety show just by standing around. The big names were on during the early evening; no one thought much of the late-night slot. But a Los Angeles radio host named Steve Allen drew a large following with "Tonight!," his free-wheeling NBC comedy show. His wacky stunts and frenetic good cheer made him the chief hipster of the '50s, and not beyond.
After Allen left, what became known as "The Tonight Show" fell into the hands of a genuine original. Jack Paar was an eminently normal-looking man, a former G.I. entertainer who planted himself at a desk instead of scampering around like Allen had. He would begin his shows in a low, well-modulated voice, exuding a dangerous calm. Then, periodically, but never predictably, he would lurch into disgruntled, pathetic soliloquies, decrying some indignity visited upon him by the network or the press. His emotional exhibitionism once led him to walk off the set in the middle of a broadcast.
Paar quit abruptly in 1962 after only five years. There was no other host like him on the horizon, and corporate T.V. did not seem to mind. Consolidating enormous gains in advertising revenue, the networks did not seek out difficult personalities. Daytime chat shows with Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin were idylls of complacency and vacuousness. The 1960s and '70s saw a few departures from formula, most of them either short-lived or half-hearted. "The Phil Donahue Show," originating from Ohio in 1967, drew on its bottomless fund of taboo subjects; but even in trying to break its own spell, network T.V. created instant cliches. Politicians, in turn, adopted all the robotic mannerisms perfected by the newscasters. Television fell into a shabby haze, a Dean Martin stupor, through which nothing ever penetrated fully.
Johnny Carson, whose shiveringly mellow "Tonight Show" reigned supreme from 1962 to 1992, resisted that stupor only halfway. Early on, he exuded a vague anti-establishment ethos, tending toward outright liberalism. But over time, the show approached an equilibrium of numbing blandness. The monologues were all charmingly mediocre, the conversations charmingly inert. The most memorable image in the last show was a dramatic floor shot of The Desk, plunged into darkness at the end of a typical-broadcast-day montage. "The Larry Sanders Show," HBO's brilliant talk-show satire, captures the bleary mediocrity that hung over Carson's final years and now blankets the bathetic regime of Jay Leno.
Still, Carson acquired an imperial grace over his twenty-nine-year era. He became a shadow president for a leaderless public, winning trust by never betraying expectations. His final moments as America's Host--alighting from Burbank in a helicopter, waving distantly to the cameras--were nothing less than Reaganesque. Like Reagan, Carson answered an increasingly desperate hunger for an enduring national icon, cool and agreeable and remote. Unlike Reagan, he really did have nothing to say and departed a widely beloved enigma.
If Carson closed out the story of the National Hosts, then it's hard to find a place for David Letterman. He came on stage as an insincere endnote to the Carson phenomenon, a cynical extension of a faded form. He had no trace of Carson's transcontinental, Vegas-tinged suavity. But he gathered a solid following through NBC's "Late Night," and with his new show on CBS he is improbably leading the "late-night war." He is the model of the new television personality, less intent on universal adoration than on a kind of maladjusted--and ironic--realism.
His first incarnation, as the anti-host, the anti-Carson, was the most amusing and also the most limited. "Late Night," in the early and mid-'80s, was "The Tonight Show" gone to seed. Every component in its daily lineup--set, guests, sidekicks, recurring characters, funny animals--was a deliberately inadequate echo of Carson's show-biz juggernaut. Letterman grinned knowingly through all the expert nonsense and shabbiness around him. Draped with ominous praise-- "hip," "subversive," "ironic" and "in tune with the zeitgeist"--the show fit snugly the culture of the mid-'80s. In his book Boxed In, Mark Crispin Miller tagged Letterman with "that air of laid-back irony against which all enthusiasm seems contemptible"--the empty irony that undermines a dominant mode without advancing anything to take its place. At his most smug in 1985, he did a show called "Too Tired To Do A Show" in which he just hung around the office and threw pencils at the ceiling. This was the silent counterculture, the party in the basement den that didn't disturb the parents upstairs.
Seeing that the anti-show had run its course, Letterman retrenched. The collegiate silliness faded away, and the show became a theater of his difficult personality, his mix of white-bread Americana and interstellar eccentricity. His model was no longer the goofy Steve Allen but the slow- burning Jack Paar. But where Paar waged battles with real-life enemies, Letterman fussed over tiny perturbations in his vicinity and gave vent to abstract complaints. At CBS he has taken on a brighter and busier tone, but his act remains essentially the same.
This host's point of departure is his total disregard for celebrity culture. Carson always seemed interested. Letterman's interviews with major stars show an impeccable ignorance of their projects and careers. He has endorsed nothing, joined no known political groups or causes, evaded People and "Entertainment Tonight." His session with Barbara Walters a couple of years ago was a masterpiece of nondisclosure. For many years he entered the news only on the barely plausible pretext of a crazy woman breaking into his home. Knowing American pop culture's tendency to glaze over its personalities, he makes himself known only through the distorted lens of his little talk-show kingdom.
To a remarkable degree, Letterman constructs his on-air persona simply with words. When he fields responses from guests and random individuals reached by camera or by phone, he is looking for dead words, raw cliches, banalities waiting to be stuffed and mounted. Once he called up a woman operating a concession stand at the Grand Canyon and asked for a description of the view; his stated aim was to hear her say the word "breathtaking." He became greatly agitated when she did not. On-air conversations he's had over the years with his mother, Dorothy Letterman, operate on the same principle. If all else fails, verbal white noise is furnished by Paul Shaffer, the dependable bandleader who speaks in a purified show-biz dialect.
The spin Letterman puts on all this accumulated triteness still falls under the heading of irony, but it can no longer be described as "laid-back." Rather than simply recite cliches in a sarcastic tone, as he did early on, he nervously tampers with them until they become his own. When he introduces a guest as "always talented," for example, he is savoring the dissonance that crops up when the show-biz intro "always personable, very talented" is crunched together. Any strange combination of words intrigues him; he once reported a phrase uttered in the middle of the night on the Home Shopping Club--"Now turn over your swan candlestick holders"--and excitedly announced to his audience: "In the whole history of human civilization, those particular words had never before been uttered together."
On his best nights, Letterman is seized with a sort of broadcasting dementia, parroting television's moribund voices. He becomes the as-if host, speaking grandly to a nonexistent Winchellian public. Setting up a bland joke in his monologue, he abandons the cue card and starts babbling like Dan Rather finally gone over the brink: "In society as we know it today, in this current international situation, this seething caldron of global tension, this overall geopolitical condition of unease in which we presently find ourselves, a condition palpable even in this room, almost tangible even as we speak...." Spinning out endless strings of synonyms, underscoring them with arbitrary gesticulations, Letterman becomes an opulently eccentric, almost aristocratic presence, the sort television was supposed to have disallowed long ago.
The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves eventually gives way to a second, less innocent, pose: the Great White Misanthrope. This is the one with which casual viewers are probably familiar--the middle-aged man with the grimacing grin, the lethally empty gaze, the disgusted snicker. Women guests are treated to a display of nervousness, condescension and adolescent leering. Any young actress or model causes him to be revoltingly smarmy: he might lock her in a bear hug when she first comes onstage, releasing her several seconds after she visibly has begun to squirm. With black guests, he generally leans far back in his chair and loses his colloquial assurance. Any mention of homosexuality throws him into a mild panic.
It is this corrosive persona that draws a following of a million or more 18- to 49-year-old white males. (In his slightly underrated American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis made the cartoon-wasp antihero an eager fan of "Late Night.") T.V. writers tend to describe this aspect of his character in a contemptuous "Gotcha!" tone--as if Letterman had accidentally revealed his true awfulness. But not only is Letterman aware of the problem--"sometimes I even annoy myself"--he goes out of his way to elaborate and exaggerate the lonely white- guy image. Once he related this exchange with a diner in a restaurant-- Japanese, he emphasized--who offered to share a table when Letterman was dining alone:
Letterman: No, no, I can't do that, I'd be imposing.
Japanese diner: What do you mean?
Letterman: All my life, I've been an imposition.
Japanese diner: I don't understand. What do you mean?
Letterman: I have a personality disorder.
Japanese diner: What kind?
Here Letterman broke off the dialogue, having made the point that the Japanese diner was a peculiarly persistent individual. But the image one carries away is of the famous T.V. star sitting alone in a restaurant, telling strangers that he is socially inept or even mentally diseased. Unlike nearly any other American celebrity you could think of, Letterman does not want to be loved.
After several overblown opening shows, Letterman's "Late Show" on CBS has turned out to be a sort of splendid apotheosis. While holding on to his singular mannerisms, the host seems more content with the everyday routine, much as Bill Murray's cynical weatherman found serenity in Groundhog Day. He is nicer to the guests, and the guests now play along when his now-legendary sourness returns. He has gotten under the skin of television's mainstream appeal, and stares out with slightly demented eyes. Meanwhile, his double- pronged technique of disenchantment--the vacant-ironic manipulation of national broadcasting, the entrenched subcultural appeal--has spread in unexpected directions. Rush Limbaugh has turned it around and made it meaningful, although not as meaningful as one might hope.
Limbaugh's debut as a television host was not auspicious. It came in the waning days of "The Pat Sajak Show," CBS's pre-Letterman attempt at a late- night franchise. Various people were guest-hosting in Sajak's place, auditioning for a new version of the show. Limbaugh tried out in December 1990. His hour on the air was fatally disrupted by a throng of act-up demonstrators protesting his constant resort to anti-gay remarks on his nationally syndicated radio show. The man who had once attacked homosexuality as "deadly, sickly behavior," who filed a regular "Gerbil Update," wilted before this on-air protest. "He came out full of bluster and left a very shaken man," said a CBS executive. "I had never seen a man sweat so much in my life."
Yet another veteran of the talk-show world was not discouraged by Limbaugh's CBS experience. This was Roger Ailes, best known as a T.V. coach for recent Republican presidents, but a talk-show producer by vocation. He is serious about the format, and his career shows a logical evolution. He was executive producer for "The Mike Douglas Show" in the '60s and '70s, where he perfected the art of making anyone appear comfortable on T.V. In the late '70s, he guided the late-night NBC show "Tomorrow," hosted by Tom Snyder; this was a much pricklier affair. NBC canceled it in 1982 in favor of "Late Night With David Letterman." A decade later, Ailes found in Limbaugh the basis for an entirely new kind of host-driven talk show, with current events as the only guests.
The Ailes-produced "Rush Limbaugh Show," first seen in September of 1992, was dismissed as an aberration by most T.V. critics. All the articles about the "talk-show wars" paid it no attention whatsoever, and even The Wall Street Journal had to ask, "Where are the visuals? Why is this man on T.V.?" The host is indeed an unconventional presence. He barks at the viewers as if he were sitting across from them in a noisy restaurant. His figure isn't altogether congruent with the standard rectangular screen. (Perhaps letterboxing would solve this problem.) The studio audience is unsettlingly unanimous; although there is no applause sign, applause cuts off with needle-sharp precision. There is an infomercial ambience.
But people have been watching. A few months into its run, the show's ratings were equal to or greater than Letterman's "Late Night" in some markets (average Nielsens of 3.0). He has gotten better at T.V., marshaling video clips and man-on-the-street interviews to bear out his points. The best of these recently was a dazzling montage of disparate personalities speaking in favor of traditional values--everyone from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Louis Farrakhan. Another set of tapes demonstrated John F. Kennedy's allegiance to Reaganomics. But more important, Limbaugh has found ways to go against the grain of the medium, to resist its standardizing pressure. He has learned to replicate on T.V. the intellectual emotion that powers his radio shows. In these respects, his link to Letterman is clearest.
At first glance, they seem as far apart as possible: Limbaugh, with his weekly 20 million listeners, his record-breaking best sellers, his newsletter that has over three times more readers than the magazine you are holding, his "Rush Rooms" in steak houses across the country--and Letterman, with his Viewer Mail, and the woman who breaks into his house. Limbaugh is at his best with on-the-spot political commentary; Letterman wings his way far above, or behind, current events. But there is a solid likeness between the right-winger and the no-winger. Both are cigar-smoking, divorced men in their mid-40s, from solid midwestern backgrounds (Kansas and Indiana, respectively). Both grew up in the 1960s but were untouched by its ferment. Both have ended up in New York, happily disgusted at its squalor. Both are noted for being painfully shy and insecure in person.
Three extant biographies--The Rush Limbaugh Story: Talent on Loan from God: An Unauthorized Biography by Paul D. Colford, Rush! by Michael Arkush and The David Letterman Story: An Unauthorized Biography by Caroline Latham--supply material for more detailed parallels. As Colford points out in passing, both men were devoted listeners of a Chicago-based D.J.. named Larry Lujack, whose act combined bombast and skepticism. Limbaugh started in radio with an FM rock show, while Letterman took on odd jobs for local T.V. stations. Limbaugh was consistently fired from jobs for interjecting conservative opinions into nonopinion formats. Letterman found similar discouragement when he interpolated comic material--his legendary Indianapolis weather reports, for example, in which imaginary storms decimated far-flung locales. (Letterman tried a talk-radio show in the mid-'70s and got nowhere. "The Nixon-Watergate nonsense," he recalled, "was the perfect example of something about which I knew nothing and couldn't have cared less.")
And there can be no doubt that Limbaugh has studied Letterman's show closely. He makes himself vivid by ruffling items on his desk noisily and giving cameo roles to his staff and crew. He fashions an identity from the driftwood of television language, repeating an ordinary phrase until it becomes his intellectual property. "This show is on the cutting edge of societal evolution," he says, in language usually reserved for sports cars or home entertainment systems. When he sees such prosaic phrases elsewhere in the media, he then can herald the universality of his own influence. Even more Lettermanlike, he alters banalities in midstream: "The views expressed by the host of this program will soon become federal law." The grandiose address to "listeners all across the fruited plain" echoes Letterman's "great American home-viewing public" and Winchell's "Mr. and Mrs. America." The result of all this is that Limbaugh acquires a critical distance from his medium and from himself.
What are Limbaugh's aims in appropriating and paralleling Letterman? The first possibility is that it is all a brilliant ruse designed to disguise a conservative crusade as mere entertainment. When speaking to "mainstream" publications, Limbaugh suspiciously insists that his show is all in good fun, just show biz. "This show exists in the entertainment arena," he said to Vanity Fair. His call-screener added, "The politics on this show are secondary to [Limbaugh's] personality." And again, in the book The Way Things Ought To Be: "I refuse to use the entertainment forum of my radio show to advance agendas or causes." These, surely, are disingenuous words from the man who gave a huge boost to Pat Buchanan in the New Hampshire primary, who forced disclosure of names in the House banking scandal and who could tilt the Republican primaries in 1996.
And yet if you try to pin down specifically a Limbaugh agenda, a Limbaugh cause, you might end up a little baffled. His first requirement in articulating any position is that it be nonliberal. In essence, if it is nonliberal, it is conservative. He gives little thought to tensions within present-day conservatism. He skips happily from Reagan to Kemp to Bennett to Buchanan and back again. He dedicates himself to small business and local interests, then advocates NAFTA and corporatist economics. His "traditional values" twist gently in the wind, leaning toward moderation when pressed. He has been virtually silent on gay issues, except to echo the party line on gays in the military. Once he even took a call from a Republican gay man in Manhattan, and suggested that people like him should be seen at the next Republican convention.
So too with his thoughts on feminism, which are less a social philosophy than a particularly extreme men-are-different-from-women rant of the kind practiced by stand-up comics. "It can be misused," he says of his term "femi-Nazi," by which he might mean any use not idiosyncratically his own. When his needling critiques of black leaders are attacked as racist, he hollowly responds, "I am the opposite of a racist." Limbaugh is the opposite of opposites. He is a giant double negative, the logical outcome of a point-counterpoint style of political discourse. His straw-man liberal is an empty antinomial category, a clever rerouting of the bland barbs long thrown at conservatives (hence the Nazi rhetoric for feminists). He has an uncanny ability to fast-forward through the tit-for-tat cliches of T.V. debate, doing the pundits in different voices--a one-man McLaughlin Group.
With their churning syntax and overreaching vocabulary, Limbaugh's stem-winders are themselves a twist on electronic tradition. They often sound like a giant disc jockey put-on, an endless FM prank. Periodically Limbaugh plays with this resemblance by hoaxing his own listeners--infamously, his "conversion to Clinton" a couple of weeks before the 1992 election, which incited a War of the Worlds panic among millions of American conservatives. Limbaugh's rhetorical vigor makes the line between seriousness, humorous exaggeration and outright absurdity rather blurry. "I demonstrate the absurd by being absurd," he reiterates; but it is not always the liberal position that is so demonstrated.
All the problems posed by Limbaugh's politics are solved if one takes him at his word and sees him as an entertainer. The two "unauthorized" Limbaugh biographies--Colford's is fairly neutral, Arkush's is faintly damning--depict a man who used politics as a means to an entertainment end, rather than the other way around. He was never politically active in his own right, and was not even registered to vote until the mid-'80s. Reagan, the man he trumpets as God walking on earth, never received his vote. He measures his success purely in terms of media statistics--the number of stations in his syndicated empire, the number of weeks his books stay on the best-seller list, the Nielsen ratings for his T.V. show. He was absolutely exultant when Clinton won the election, knowing that a Republican party in opposition would bolster his appeal. "They think that my era of dominant influence has come crashing down," he roared. "It has, in fact, barely begun. My era of dominant influence now shall come to the fore."
What is that influence exactly, if not a strictly political one? Some have called Limbaugh a rabble-rouser in the mold of Father Coughlin or Huey Long. A better comparison, once again, would be Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist as national statesman. Limbaugh very often grasps ideology through personalities; he is constantly recounting his encounters with everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Charles Barkley. Commentary and comedy blend with news, anecdotes and a great many traditional radio bits (weird news, off-the-cuff endorsements) thrown in for good measure. But in the end, he is something completely new: a vertically integrated media complex for like-minded conservatives, plus entertainment for the broader mass of perennial skeptics. His appeal is actually more diverse than Letterman's, seeming to encompass more female viewers and more older viewers. Almost anyone from any group could be hooked by his bravura display of politics as entertainment, and vice versa, or whatever else you want to call it. As the opposite of the opposite of what used to be conservatism, Limbaugh can only fall back on his own burgeoning selfhood to hold together his political platform. Two of his favorite phrases are all too easily interchangeable: "This program is about the truth" and "This program is about what I think." The politics of ego become inseparable from the culture of irony.
And irony is what, after all, connects Limbaugh and Letterman and the television history they both refract. Irony can only be recovered in reference to a dominant language, a dominant medium, and television is without question such a medium. Letterman has assumed authority by undercutting the host formula and pretending to hate his job. Limbaugh tries to unite conservative subcultures into a broad political base by piling skepticism on top of fuzzy nostalgia. Both connect with a culture that is viscerally alert to media manipulation, but that is also a sucker for self-consciousness.
They have their colleagues in the political arena. Ronald Reagan, the former announcer, used the tropes of television and a cunning wit to distance himself from the idea of himself, to create a stage persona that T.V. audiences found appealing on its own terms. The substance of his views had taken shape long before, but irony propelled them through the screen. George Bush, with little ironic talent, valiantly attempted to parlay Reagan's technique into a rationale for an entire administration. Even more telling is the example of Ross Perot, who mixes his super-direct facts and figures with a dazzling (and, it turns out, uncontrollable) defiance of expectations. A new plateau of ironic politics was officially reached when the Texan responded to intimations of mental instability by dancing with his daughter to the strains of Patsy Cline's "Crazy."
All politicians, of course, are ironists to the extent that they are all dissemblers. But the Democratic Party seems remarkably inept in the face of Letterman-Limbaugh culture. It has mastered guerrilla-level media manipulation, but its candidates perennially adopt an earnest tone that television cuts to shreds. The Clinton people, who ought to be young enough to know the territory by heart, show no grasp of irony at all. Al Gore put in a valiant appearance on Letterman's show, of which both he and Clinton seem to be fans; but the idea is to be a commanding host, not a well-behaved guest. Clinton himself--fathomlessly earnest and deaf to the nuances of Limbaugh's and Letterman's posturing--is at sea in a culture drenched in detachment. His frozen smile gives him the look of a sidekick handing out prizes.
Placing no distance between himself and his image, prizing an unmediated communication with the voters, Clinton buys into the liberal illusion that there is a third choice, beyond radicalism and irony--a choice of reasonableness, decency, meaning. That may be why he has so far failed to connect intuitively and decisively with the American public of today, and why his strongest demographic group is still the elderly. Clinton has yet to grapple with the climate in which he is operating and with the culture that insistently refuses to take him to heart. If he wants to gain some ground, he could start by watching T.V. more closely after 11:35 p.m. The real Culture War, he might discover, has nothing whatsoever to do with the religious right.
THE POLITICS OF IRONY
By Alex Ross
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The intellectual human being must choose between irony and radicalism; a third choice is not decently possible.
--Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Television began with a man sitting at a desk, talking. The desk, at first, was a matter of necessity--early T.V. cameras were massive and immobile, so their subjects needed a visual motive for staying put. Journalists were cast as "anchors," and entertainers as "hosts," each installed at desks or desklike areas. Perhaps there were deeper psycho-historical origins: Roosevelt had ruled the nation from an infirm patrician's seat. In any case, desks have now become indispensable. They impart an executive bearing to the sitters, who make completely spurious note-taking motions when the camera cuts away to a commercial. Anyone on television capable of taking notes has an edge on the average viewer.
Fresh waves of technology and fashion should have put this antique format out of circulation. But the desks are more numerous than ever, especially after 11 p.m. At a time when television is dissolving into subculturally specialized, aesthetically disheveled fragments, the late-night host somehow has held on to iconic status--trumpeted by network publicity, debated in workplaces, dissected in reams of articles such as this one. It is as if he (and it is still universally a he) has become a critical common referent in a hopelessly uncentered culture. Addressing a public of infinitely malleable size, creating events from thin air, the host is asked to engineer the illusive unities, bridging gaps that our politicians long have been unable to navigate.
How does a host address a nation of subcultures? The one subject known to us all is television itself--its rules, its rhetoric, its accumulated history and literature. And so the common language has been an ironic subversion of television itself: the most popular shows on T.V. right now are about T.V.-- "Murphy Brown," "Home Improvement" and (fitfully) "Seinfeld," to name three top contenders. Others, such as "Roseanne," "Married ... With Children" and "The Simpsons," invert the model family shows of T.V.'s past. Self-referential irony, thought to be the annoying trivium of the 1980s, has settled in for the long haul.
Through this haze, the hosts have stumbled on what might be called the politics of irony. They who grasp it wield strong cultural-political clout. While the vast following that upheld Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" is gone forever, the more narrow but intense regard for a David Letterman or a Rush Limbaugh has no less weight. The new host is a sly virtuoso of layered meanings, a contrapuntalist of revealed and concealed messages. The new kind of host is also--critically--not a liberal. Earnest, Clintonian liberalism so far has floundered in the new conditions. Conservatives, it turns out, know their T.V. better.
But first, some talk-show history. The original hosts were nationally syndicated gossip columnists, hired by radio to simulate glamour for 1930s audiences. Walter Winchell, of the Daily Mirror, won fame second to none simply by sitting at his table at the Stork Club, gathering gossip for his monologues. Celebrities came to pay homage, and he would report their quips and exploits alongside questionable stories from all sources--thus an atmosphere of "guests" circulating around him. One-third of the nation watched in fascination as he became a figure of national importance, preaching a blend of gung-ho patriotism and gangsterish apathy. FDR and J. Edgar Hoover were both in his debt. He stamped himself on the flow of events around him with an array of stylistic tics: the spastic, gibberish-flavored prose style; the much-imitated triple-dot punctuation; the grand salutation to "Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea." He was vainglorious, nasty, vague, central.
Louella Parsons, columnist for the all-powerful Hearst newspapers and host of "Hollywood Hotel," was no less potent; she too boosted Hoover, although entertainment remained her primary interest. She is best remembered for two interventions she made in the careers of performers entering film from radio: the destruction of Orson Welles, whose debut film Citizen Kane unwisely attacked Hearst head-on, and the elevation of Ronald Reagan, who was lucky enough to come from her hometown of Dixon, Illinois. Parsons promoted Reagan at the outset of his career, finding him a bit role in the 1937 film version of Hollywood Hotel.
Parsons never made it to television, and Winchell's attempt at a show in the '50s failed miserably. The most popular hosts in the new medium were far less tendentious and imposing. Arthur Godfrey hosted folksy chat shows with titles like "Arthur Godfrey and His Friends," drawing audiences of up to 80 million people. Ed Sullivan carried a variety show just by standing around. The big names were on during the early evening; no one thought much of the late-night slot. But a Los Angeles radio host named Steve Allen drew a large following with "Tonight!," his free-wheeling NBC comedy show. His wacky stunts and frenetic good cheer made him the chief hipster of the '50s, and not beyond.
After Allen left, what became known as "The Tonight Show" fell into the hands of a genuine original. Jack Paar was an eminently normal-looking man, a former G.I. entertainer who planted himself at a desk instead of scampering around like Allen had. He would begin his shows in a low, well-modulated voice, exuding a dangerous calm. Then, periodically, but never predictably, he would lurch into disgruntled, pathetic soliloquies, decrying some indignity visited upon him by the network or the press. His emotional exhibitionism once led him to walk off the set in the middle of a broadcast.
Paar quit abruptly in 1962 after only five years. There was no other host like him on the horizon, and corporate T.V. did not seem to mind. Consolidating enormous gains in advertising revenue, the networks did not seek out difficult personalities. Daytime chat shows with Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin were idylls of complacency and vacuousness. The 1960s and '70s saw a few departures from formula, most of them either short-lived or half-hearted. "The Phil Donahue Show," originating from Ohio in 1967, drew on its bottomless fund of taboo subjects; but even in trying to break its own spell, network T.V. created instant cliches. Politicians, in turn, adopted all the robotic mannerisms perfected by the newscasters. Television fell into a shabby haze, a Dean Martin stupor, through which nothing ever penetrated fully.
Johnny Carson, whose shiveringly mellow "Tonight Show" reigned supreme from 1962 to 1992, resisted that stupor only halfway. Early on, he exuded a vague anti-establishment ethos, tending toward outright liberalism. But over time, the show approached an equilibrium of numbing blandness. The monologues were all charmingly mediocre, the conversations charmingly inert. The most memorable image in the last show was a dramatic floor shot of The Desk, plunged into darkness at the end of a typical-broadcast-day montage. "The Larry Sanders Show," HBO's brilliant talk-show satire, captures the bleary mediocrity that hung over Carson's final years and now blankets the bathetic regime of Jay Leno.
Still, Carson acquired an imperial grace over his twenty-nine-year era. He became a shadow president for a leaderless public, winning trust by never betraying expectations. His final moments as America's Host--alighting from Burbank in a helicopter, waving distantly to the cameras--were nothing less than Reaganesque. Like Reagan, Carson answered an increasingly desperate hunger for an enduring national icon, cool and agreeable and remote. Unlike Reagan, he really did have nothing to say and departed a widely beloved enigma.
If Carson closed out the story of the National Hosts, then it's hard to find a place for David Letterman. He came on stage as an insincere endnote to the Carson phenomenon, a cynical extension of a faded form. He had no trace of Carson's transcontinental, Vegas-tinged suavity. But he gathered a solid following through NBC's "Late Night," and with his new show on CBS he is improbably leading the "late-night war." He is the model of the new television personality, less intent on universal adoration than on a kind of maladjusted--and ironic--realism.
His first incarnation, as the anti-host, the anti-Carson, was the most amusing and also the most limited. "Late Night," in the early and mid-'80s, was "The Tonight Show" gone to seed. Every component in its daily lineup--set, guests, sidekicks, recurring characters, funny animals--was a deliberately inadequate echo of Carson's show-biz juggernaut. Letterman grinned knowingly through all the expert nonsense and shabbiness around him. Draped with ominous praise-- "hip," "subversive," "ironic" and "in tune with the zeitgeist"--the show fit snugly the culture of the mid-'80s. In his book Boxed In, Mark Crispin Miller tagged Letterman with "that air of laid-back irony against which all enthusiasm seems contemptible"--the empty irony that undermines a dominant mode without advancing anything to take its place. At his most smug in 1985, he did a show called "Too Tired To Do A Show" in which he just hung around the office and threw pencils at the ceiling. This was the silent counterculture, the party in the basement den that didn't disturb the parents upstairs.
Seeing that the anti-show had run its course, Letterman retrenched. The collegiate silliness faded away, and the show became a theater of his difficult personality, his mix of white-bread Americana and interstellar eccentricity. His model was no longer the goofy Steve Allen but the slow- burning Jack Paar. But where Paar waged battles with real-life enemies, Letterman fussed over tiny perturbations in his vicinity and gave vent to abstract complaints. At CBS he has taken on a brighter and busier tone, but his act remains essentially the same.
This host's point of departure is his total disregard for celebrity culture. Carson always seemed interested. Letterman's interviews with major stars show an impeccable ignorance of their projects and careers. He has endorsed nothing, joined no known political groups or causes, evaded People and "Entertainment Tonight." His session with Barbara Walters a couple of years ago was a masterpiece of nondisclosure. For many years he entered the news only on the barely plausible pretext of a crazy woman breaking into his home. Knowing American pop culture's tendency to glaze over its personalities, he makes himself known only through the distorted lens of his little talk-show kingdom.
To a remarkable degree, Letterman constructs his on-air persona simply with words. When he fields responses from guests and random individuals reached by camera or by phone, he is looking for dead words, raw cliches, banalities waiting to be stuffed and mounted. Once he called up a woman operating a concession stand at the Grand Canyon and asked for a description of the view; his stated aim was to hear her say the word "breathtaking." He became greatly agitated when she did not. On-air conversations he's had over the years with his mother, Dorothy Letterman, operate on the same principle. If all else fails, verbal white noise is furnished by Paul Shaffer, the dependable bandleader who speaks in a purified show-biz dialect.
The spin Letterman puts on all this accumulated triteness still falls under the heading of irony, but it can no longer be described as "laid-back." Rather than simply recite cliches in a sarcastic tone, as he did early on, he nervously tampers with them until they become his own. When he introduces a guest as "always talented," for example, he is savoring the dissonance that crops up when the show-biz intro "always personable, very talented" is crunched together. Any strange combination of words intrigues him; he once reported a phrase uttered in the middle of the night on the Home Shopping Club--"Now turn over your swan candlestick holders"--and excitedly announced to his audience: "In the whole history of human civilization, those particular words had never before been uttered together."
On his best nights, Letterman is seized with a sort of broadcasting dementia, parroting television's moribund voices. He becomes the as-if host, speaking grandly to a nonexistent Winchellian public. Setting up a bland joke in his monologue, he abandons the cue card and starts babbling like Dan Rather finally gone over the brink: "In society as we know it today, in this current international situation, this seething caldron of global tension, this overall geopolitical condition of unease in which we presently find ourselves, a condition palpable even in this room, almost tangible even as we speak...." Spinning out endless strings of synonyms, underscoring them with arbitrary gesticulations, Letterman becomes an opulently eccentric, almost aristocratic presence, the sort television was supposed to have disallowed long ago.
The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves eventually gives way to a second, less innocent, pose: the Great White Misanthrope. This is the one with which casual viewers are probably familiar--the middle-aged man with the grimacing grin, the lethally empty gaze, the disgusted snicker. Women guests are treated to a display of nervousness, condescension and adolescent leering. Any young actress or model causes him to be revoltingly smarmy: he might lock her in a bear hug when she first comes onstage, releasing her several seconds after she visibly has begun to squirm. With black guests, he generally leans far back in his chair and loses his colloquial assurance. Any mention of homosexuality throws him into a mild panic.
It is this corrosive persona that draws a following of a million or more 18- to 49-year-old white males. (In his slightly underrated American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis made the cartoon-wasp antihero an eager fan of "Late Night.") T.V. writers tend to describe this aspect of his character in a contemptuous "Gotcha!" tone--as if Letterman had accidentally revealed his true awfulness. But not only is Letterman aware of the problem--"sometimes I even annoy myself"--he goes out of his way to elaborate and exaggerate the lonely white- guy image. Once he related this exchange with a diner in a restaurant-- Japanese, he emphasized--who offered to share a table when Letterman was dining alone:
Letterman: No, no, I can't do that, I'd be imposing.
Japanese diner: What do you mean?
Letterman: All my life, I've been an imposition.
Japanese diner: I don't understand. What do you mean?
Letterman: I have a personality disorder.
Japanese diner: What kind?
Here Letterman broke off the dialogue, having made the point that the Japanese diner was a peculiarly persistent individual. But the image one carries away is of the famous T.V. star sitting alone in a restaurant, telling strangers that he is socially inept or even mentally diseased. Unlike nearly any other American celebrity you could think of, Letterman does not want to be loved.
After several overblown opening shows, Letterman's "Late Show" on CBS has turned out to be a sort of splendid apotheosis. While holding on to his singular mannerisms, the host seems more content with the everyday routine, much as Bill Murray's cynical weatherman found serenity in Groundhog Day. He is nicer to the guests, and the guests now play along when his now-legendary sourness returns. He has gotten under the skin of television's mainstream appeal, and stares out with slightly demented eyes. Meanwhile, his double- pronged technique of disenchantment--the vacant-ironic manipulation of national broadcasting, the entrenched subcultural appeal--has spread in unexpected directions. Rush Limbaugh has turned it around and made it meaningful, although not as meaningful as one might hope.
Limbaugh's debut as a television host was not auspicious. It came in the waning days of "The Pat Sajak Show," CBS's pre-Letterman attempt at a late- night franchise. Various people were guest-hosting in Sajak's place, auditioning for a new version of the show. Limbaugh tried out in December 1990. His hour on the air was fatally disrupted by a throng of act-up demonstrators protesting his constant resort to anti-gay remarks on his nationally syndicated radio show. The man who had once attacked homosexuality as "deadly, sickly behavior," who filed a regular "Gerbil Update," wilted before this on-air protest. "He came out full of bluster and left a very shaken man," said a CBS executive. "I had never seen a man sweat so much in my life."
Yet another veteran of the talk-show world was not discouraged by Limbaugh's CBS experience. This was Roger Ailes, best known as a T.V. coach for recent Republican presidents, but a talk-show producer by vocation. He is serious about the format, and his career shows a logical evolution. He was executive producer for "The Mike Douglas Show" in the '60s and '70s, where he perfected the art of making anyone appear comfortable on T.V. In the late '70s, he guided the late-night NBC show "Tomorrow," hosted by Tom Snyder; this was a much pricklier affair. NBC canceled it in 1982 in favor of "Late Night With David Letterman." A decade later, Ailes found in Limbaugh the basis for an entirely new kind of host-driven talk show, with current events as the only guests.
The Ailes-produced "Rush Limbaugh Show," first seen in September of 1992, was dismissed as an aberration by most T.V. critics. All the articles about the "talk-show wars" paid it no attention whatsoever, and even The Wall Street Journal had to ask, "Where are the visuals? Why is this man on T.V.?" The host is indeed an unconventional presence. He barks at the viewers as if he were sitting across from them in a noisy restaurant. His figure isn't altogether congruent with the standard rectangular screen. (Perhaps letterboxing would solve this problem.) The studio audience is unsettlingly unanimous; although there is no applause sign, applause cuts off with needle-sharp precision. There is an infomercial ambience.
But people have been watching. A few months into its run, the show's ratings were equal to or greater than Letterman's "Late Night" in some markets (average Nielsens of 3.0). He has gotten better at T.V., marshaling video clips and man-on-the-street interviews to bear out his points. The best of these recently was a dazzling montage of disparate personalities speaking in favor of traditional values--everyone from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Louis Farrakhan. Another set of tapes demonstrated John F. Kennedy's allegiance to Reaganomics. But more important, Limbaugh has found ways to go against the grain of the medium, to resist its standardizing pressure. He has learned to replicate on T.V. the intellectual emotion that powers his radio shows. In these respects, his link to Letterman is clearest.
At first glance, they seem as far apart as possible: Limbaugh, with his weekly 20 million listeners, his record-breaking best sellers, his newsletter that has over three times more readers than the magazine you are holding, his "Rush Rooms" in steak houses across the country--and Letterman, with his Viewer Mail, and the woman who breaks into his house. Limbaugh is at his best with on-the-spot political commentary; Letterman wings his way far above, or behind, current events. But there is a solid likeness between the right-winger and the no-winger. Both are cigar-smoking, divorced men in their mid-40s, from solid midwestern backgrounds (Kansas and Indiana, respectively). Both grew up in the 1960s but were untouched by its ferment. Both have ended up in New York, happily disgusted at its squalor. Both are noted for being painfully shy and insecure in person.
Three extant biographies--The Rush Limbaugh Story: Talent on Loan from God: An Unauthorized Biography by Paul D. Colford, Rush! by Michael Arkush and The David Letterman Story: An Unauthorized Biography by Caroline Latham--supply material for more detailed parallels. As Colford points out in passing, both men were devoted listeners of a Chicago-based D.J.. named Larry Lujack, whose act combined bombast and skepticism. Limbaugh started in radio with an FM rock show, while Letterman took on odd jobs for local T.V. stations. Limbaugh was consistently fired from jobs for interjecting conservative opinions into nonopinion formats. Letterman found similar discouragement when he interpolated comic material--his legendary Indianapolis weather reports, for example, in which imaginary storms decimated far-flung locales. (Letterman tried a talk-radio show in the mid-'70s and got nowhere. "The Nixon-Watergate nonsense," he recalled, "was the perfect example of something about which I knew nothing and couldn't have cared less.")
And there can be no doubt that Limbaugh has studied Letterman's show closely. He makes himself vivid by ruffling items on his desk noisily and giving cameo roles to his staff and crew. He fashions an identity from the driftwood of television language, repeating an ordinary phrase until it becomes his intellectual property. "This show is on the cutting edge of societal evolution," he says, in language usually reserved for sports cars or home entertainment systems. When he sees such prosaic phrases elsewhere in the media, he then can herald the universality of his own influence. Even more Lettermanlike, he alters banalities in midstream: "The views expressed by the host of this program will soon become federal law." The grandiose address to "listeners all across the fruited plain" echoes Letterman's "great American home-viewing public" and Winchell's "Mr. and Mrs. America." The result of all this is that Limbaugh acquires a critical distance from his medium and from himself.
What are Limbaugh's aims in appropriating and paralleling Letterman? The first possibility is that it is all a brilliant ruse designed to disguise a conservative crusade as mere entertainment. When speaking to "mainstream" publications, Limbaugh suspiciously insists that his show is all in good fun, just show biz. "This show exists in the entertainment arena," he said to Vanity Fair. His call-screener added, "The politics on this show are secondary to [Limbaugh's] personality." And again, in the book The Way Things Ought To Be: "I refuse to use the entertainment forum of my radio show to advance agendas or causes." These, surely, are disingenuous words from the man who gave a huge boost to Pat Buchanan in the New Hampshire primary, who forced disclosure of names in the House banking scandal and who could tilt the Republican primaries in 1996.
And yet if you try to pin down specifically a Limbaugh agenda, a Limbaugh cause, you might end up a little baffled. His first requirement in articulating any position is that it be nonliberal. In essence, if it is nonliberal, it is conservative. He gives little thought to tensions within present-day conservatism. He skips happily from Reagan to Kemp to Bennett to Buchanan and back again. He dedicates himself to small business and local interests, then advocates NAFTA and corporatist economics. His "traditional values" twist gently in the wind, leaning toward moderation when pressed. He has been virtually silent on gay issues, except to echo the party line on gays in the military. Once he even took a call from a Republican gay man in Manhattan, and suggested that people like him should be seen at the next Republican convention.
So too with his thoughts on feminism, which are less a social philosophy than a particularly extreme men-are-different-from-women rant of the kind practiced by stand-up comics. "It can be misused," he says of his term "femi-Nazi," by which he might mean any use not idiosyncratically his own. When his needling critiques of black leaders are attacked as racist, he hollowly responds, "I am the opposite of a racist." Limbaugh is the opposite of opposites. He is a giant double negative, the logical outcome of a point-counterpoint style of political discourse. His straw-man liberal is an empty antinomial category, a clever rerouting of the bland barbs long thrown at conservatives (hence the Nazi rhetoric for feminists). He has an uncanny ability to fast-forward through the tit-for-tat cliches of T.V. debate, doing the pundits in different voices--a one-man McLaughlin Group.
With their churning syntax and overreaching vocabulary, Limbaugh's stem-winders are themselves a twist on electronic tradition. They often sound like a giant disc jockey put-on, an endless FM prank. Periodically Limbaugh plays with this resemblance by hoaxing his own listeners--infamously, his "conversion to Clinton" a couple of weeks before the 1992 election, which incited a War of the Worlds panic among millions of American conservatives. Limbaugh's rhetorical vigor makes the line between seriousness, humorous exaggeration and outright absurdity rather blurry. "I demonstrate the absurd by being absurd," he reiterates; but it is not always the liberal position that is so demonstrated.
All the problems posed by Limbaugh's politics are solved if one takes him at his word and sees him as an entertainer. The two "unauthorized" Limbaugh biographies--Colford's is fairly neutral, Arkush's is faintly damning--depict a man who used politics as a means to an entertainment end, rather than the other way around. He was never politically active in his own right, and was not even registered to vote until the mid-'80s. Reagan, the man he trumpets as God walking on earth, never received his vote. He measures his success purely in terms of media statistics--the number of stations in his syndicated empire, the number of weeks his books stay on the best-seller list, the Nielsen ratings for his T.V. show. He was absolutely exultant when Clinton won the election, knowing that a Republican party in opposition would bolster his appeal. "They think that my era of dominant influence has come crashing down," he roared. "It has, in fact, barely begun. My era of dominant influence now shall come to the fore."
What is that influence exactly, if not a strictly political one? Some have called Limbaugh a rabble-rouser in the mold of Father Coughlin or Huey Long. A better comparison, once again, would be Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist as national statesman. Limbaugh very often grasps ideology through personalities; he is constantly recounting his encounters with everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Charles Barkley. Commentary and comedy blend with news, anecdotes and a great many traditional radio bits (weird news, off-the-cuff endorsements) thrown in for good measure. But in the end, he is something completely new: a vertically integrated media complex for like-minded conservatives, plus entertainment for the broader mass of perennial skeptics. His appeal is actually more diverse than Letterman's, seeming to encompass more female viewers and more older viewers. Almost anyone from any group could be hooked by his bravura display of politics as entertainment, and vice versa, or whatever else you want to call it. As the opposite of the opposite of what used to be conservatism, Limbaugh can only fall back on his own burgeoning selfhood to hold together his political platform. Two of his favorite phrases are all too easily interchangeable: "This program is about the truth" and "This program is about what I think." The politics of ego become inseparable from the culture of irony.
And irony is what, after all, connects Limbaugh and Letterman and the television history they both refract. Irony can only be recovered in reference to a dominant language, a dominant medium, and television is without question such a medium. Letterman has assumed authority by undercutting the host formula and pretending to hate his job. Limbaugh tries to unite conservative subcultures into a broad political base by piling skepticism on top of fuzzy nostalgia. Both connect with a culture that is viscerally alert to media manipulation, but that is also a sucker for self-consciousness.
They have their colleagues in the political arena. Ronald Reagan, the former announcer, used the tropes of television and a cunning wit to distance himself from the idea of himself, to create a stage persona that T.V. audiences found appealing on its own terms. The substance of his views had taken shape long before, but irony propelled them through the screen. George Bush, with little ironic talent, valiantly attempted to parlay Reagan's technique into a rationale for an entire administration. Even more telling is the example of Ross Perot, who mixes his super-direct facts and figures with a dazzling (and, it turns out, uncontrollable) defiance of expectations. A new plateau of ironic politics was officially reached when the Texan responded to intimations of mental instability by dancing with his daughter to the strains of Patsy Cline's "Crazy."
All politicians, of course, are ironists to the extent that they are all dissemblers. But the Democratic Party seems remarkably inept in the face of Letterman-Limbaugh culture. It has mastered guerrilla-level media manipulation, but its candidates perennially adopt an earnest tone that television cuts to shreds. The Clinton people, who ought to be young enough to know the territory by heart, show no grasp of irony at all. Al Gore put in a valiant appearance on Letterman's show, of which both he and Clinton seem to be fans; but the idea is to be a commanding host, not a well-behaved guest. Clinton himself--fathomlessly earnest and deaf to the nuances of Limbaugh's and Letterman's posturing--is at sea in a culture drenched in detachment. His frozen smile gives him the look of a sidekick handing out prizes.
Placing no distance between himself and his image, prizing an unmediated communication with the voters, Clinton buys into the liberal illusion that there is a third choice, beyond radicalism and irony--a choice of reasonableness, decency, meaning. That may be why he has so far failed to connect intuitively and decisively with the American public of today, and why his strongest demographic group is still the elderly. Clinton has yet to grapple with the climate in which he is operating and with the culture that insistently refuses to take him to heart. If he wants to gain some ground, he could start by watching T.V. more closely after 11:35 p.m. The real Culture War, he might discover, has nothing whatsoever to do with the religious right.
Reader Response Homework 2/14/08-2/15/08
Please respond to the following essay. Please check for spelling, grammar, and usage. Your response should be several paragraphs long.
Kicking the Big One
By Barbara Ehrenreich
An evil grips America, a life-sapping, drug-related habit. It beclouds reason and corrodes the spirit. It undermines authority and nourishes a low-minded culture of winks and smirks. It's the habit of drug prohibition, and it's quietly siphoning off the resources that might be better used for drug treatment or prevention. Numerous authorities have tried to warn us, including most recently the Surgeon General, but she got brushed off like a piece of lint. After all, drug prohibition is right up there with heroin and nicotine among the habits that are hell to kick.
Admittedly, legalization wouldn't be problem-free either. Americans have a peculiarly voracious appetite for drugs, and probably no one should weigh in on the debate who hasn't seen a friend or loved one hollowed out by cocaine or reduced to selling used appliances on the street. But if drugs take a ghastly toll, drug prohibition has proved itself, year after year, to be an even more debilitating social toxin.
Consider the moral effects of marijuana prohibition. After booze and NyQuil, pot is probably America's No. 1 drug of choice -- a transient, introspective high that can cure nausea or make the evening sitcoms look like devastating wit. An estimated 40 million Americans have tried it at some point, from Ivy League law professors to country-and-western singers. Yet in some states, possession of a few grams can get you put away for years. What does it do to one's immortal soul to puff and wink and look away while about 100,000 other Americans remain locked up for doing the exact same thing? Marijuana prohibition establishes a minimum baseline level of cultural dishonesty that we can never rise above: the President "didn't inhale," heh heh. It's O.K. to drink till you puke, but you mustn't ever smoke the vile weed, heh heh. One of the hardest things a parent can ever tell a bright and questioning teen-ager -- after all the relevant sermonizing, of course -- is, Well, just don't get caught.
But the prohibition of cocaine and heroin may be more corrosive still. Here's where organized crime comes in, the cartels and kingpins and Crips and Bloods. These are the principal beneficiaries of drug prohibition; without it they'd be reduced to three-card monte and numbers scams. Legitimate entrepreneurs must sigh and shake their heads in envy: if only the government would ban some substance like Wheat Chex, for example, so it could be marketed for hundreds of dollars an ounce.
Yes, legal drugs, even if heavily taxed and extensively regulated, would no doubt be cheaper than illegal ones, which could mean more people sampling them out of curiosity. But this danger has to be weighed against the insidious marketing dynamic of illegal drugs, whose wildly inflated prices compel the low-income user to become a pusher and recruiter of new users.
Drugs can kill, of course. But drug prohibition kills too. In Washington, an estimated 80% of homicides are drug related, meaning drug-prohibition related. It's gunshot wounds that fill our urban emergency rooms, not ODs and bad trips. Then there's the perverse financial logic of prohibition. The billions we spend a year on drug-related law enforcement represents money not spent on improving schools and rebuilding neighborhoods. Those who can't hope for the lasting highs of achievement and self-respect are all too often condemned to crack.
So why don't we kick the prohibition habit? Is it high-minded puritanism that holds us back, or political cowardice? Or maybe it's time to admit that we cling to prohibition for the same reason we cling to so many other self-destructive habits: because we like the way they make us feel. Prohibition, for example, tends to make its advocates feel powerfully righteous, and militant righteousness has effects not unlike some demon mix of liquor and amphetamines: the eyes bulge, the veins distend, the voice begins to bray.
But the most seductive thing about prohibition is that it keeps us from having to confront all the other little addictions that get us through the day. It's the NutraSweet in the coffee we use to wash down the chocolate mousse; a dad's "Just say no" commandments borne on martini-scented breath. "Don't do drugs," a Members Only ad advises. "Do clothes." Well, why "do" anything? Why not live more lightly, without compulsions of any kind? Then there's TV, the addiction whose name we can hardly speak -- the poor man's virtual reality, the substance-free citizen's 24-hour-a-day hallucinatory trip. No bleary-eyed tube addict, emerging from weekend-long catatonia, has the right to inveigh against "drugs."
When cornered, the prohibition addict has one last line of defense. We can't surrender in this war, he or she insists, because we'd be sending the "wrong message." But the message we're sending now is this: Look, kids, we know prohibition doesn't work, that it's cruel and costs so much we don't have anything left over with which to fight the social causes of addiction or treat the addicts, but, hey, it feels good, so we're going to keep right on doing it. To which the appropriate response is, of course, heh heh.
We don't have to quit cold turkey. We could start with marijuana, then ease up on cocaine and heroin possession, concentrating law enforcement on the big-time pushers. Take it slowly, see how it feels. One day at a time.
Kicking the Big One
By Barbara Ehrenreich
An evil grips America, a life-sapping, drug-related habit. It beclouds reason and corrodes the spirit. It undermines authority and nourishes a low-minded culture of winks and smirks. It's the habit of drug prohibition, and it's quietly siphoning off the resources that might be better used for drug treatment or prevention. Numerous authorities have tried to warn us, including most recently the Surgeon General, but she got brushed off like a piece of lint. After all, drug prohibition is right up there with heroin and nicotine among the habits that are hell to kick.
Admittedly, legalization wouldn't be problem-free either. Americans have a peculiarly voracious appetite for drugs, and probably no one should weigh in on the debate who hasn't seen a friend or loved one hollowed out by cocaine or reduced to selling used appliances on the street. But if drugs take a ghastly toll, drug prohibition has proved itself, year after year, to be an even more debilitating social toxin.
Consider the moral effects of marijuana prohibition. After booze and NyQuil, pot is probably America's No. 1 drug of choice -- a transient, introspective high that can cure nausea or make the evening sitcoms look like devastating wit. An estimated 40 million Americans have tried it at some point, from Ivy League law professors to country-and-western singers. Yet in some states, possession of a few grams can get you put away for years. What does it do to one's immortal soul to puff and wink and look away while about 100,000 other Americans remain locked up for doing the exact same thing? Marijuana prohibition establishes a minimum baseline level of cultural dishonesty that we can never rise above: the President "didn't inhale," heh heh. It's O.K. to drink till you puke, but you mustn't ever smoke the vile weed, heh heh. One of the hardest things a parent can ever tell a bright and questioning teen-ager -- after all the relevant sermonizing, of course -- is, Well, just don't get caught.
But the prohibition of cocaine and heroin may be more corrosive still. Here's where organized crime comes in, the cartels and kingpins and Crips and Bloods. These are the principal beneficiaries of drug prohibition; without it they'd be reduced to three-card monte and numbers scams. Legitimate entrepreneurs must sigh and shake their heads in envy: if only the government would ban some substance like Wheat Chex, for example, so it could be marketed for hundreds of dollars an ounce.
Yes, legal drugs, even if heavily taxed and extensively regulated, would no doubt be cheaper than illegal ones, which could mean more people sampling them out of curiosity. But this danger has to be weighed against the insidious marketing dynamic of illegal drugs, whose wildly inflated prices compel the low-income user to become a pusher and recruiter of new users.
Drugs can kill, of course. But drug prohibition kills too. In Washington, an estimated 80% of homicides are drug related, meaning drug-prohibition related. It's gunshot wounds that fill our urban emergency rooms, not ODs and bad trips. Then there's the perverse financial logic of prohibition. The billions we spend a year on drug-related law enforcement represents money not spent on improving schools and rebuilding neighborhoods. Those who can't hope for the lasting highs of achievement and self-respect are all too often condemned to crack.
So why don't we kick the prohibition habit? Is it high-minded puritanism that holds us back, or political cowardice? Or maybe it's time to admit that we cling to prohibition for the same reason we cling to so many other self-destructive habits: because we like the way they make us feel. Prohibition, for example, tends to make its advocates feel powerfully righteous, and militant righteousness has effects not unlike some demon mix of liquor and amphetamines: the eyes bulge, the veins distend, the voice begins to bray.
But the most seductive thing about prohibition is that it keeps us from having to confront all the other little addictions that get us through the day. It's the NutraSweet in the coffee we use to wash down the chocolate mousse; a dad's "Just say no" commandments borne on martini-scented breath. "Don't do drugs," a Members Only ad advises. "Do clothes." Well, why "do" anything? Why not live more lightly, without compulsions of any kind? Then there's TV, the addiction whose name we can hardly speak -- the poor man's virtual reality, the substance-free citizen's 24-hour-a-day hallucinatory trip. No bleary-eyed tube addict, emerging from weekend-long catatonia, has the right to inveigh against "drugs."
When cornered, the prohibition addict has one last line of defense. We can't surrender in this war, he or she insists, because we'd be sending the "wrong message." But the message we're sending now is this: Look, kids, we know prohibition doesn't work, that it's cruel and costs so much we don't have anything left over with which to fight the social causes of addiction or treat the addicts, but, hey, it feels good, so we're going to keep right on doing it. To which the appropriate response is, of course, heh heh.
We don't have to quit cold turkey. We could start with marijuana, then ease up on cocaine and heroin possession, concentrating law enforcement on the big-time pushers. Take it slowly, see how it feels. One day at a time.
Homework 2/12/08-2/13/08
Students are asked to respond to this article. If you cannot view the internet at home studnets may choose any article from the LA Times and respond to that article using the detailed notes taken in class regarding Reader Resonse. As always students must check for grammar, spelling, and usage errors in order to receive a passing grade.
I Want My MTV
by Matthew A. Munich
The concept of the music video, a short film in which video images interpret a song, is not a new one. The beginnings date as far back as the 1960s in the Beatles' full-length film A Hard Day's Night or later in the Rolling Stones' movie Gimme Shelter. With cable television and some of its subsidiary channels, however, the music video has received a tremendous amount of attention and popularity. MTV, a channel devoted solely to showing music videos twenty-four hours a day, has made the music video not only a new medium but also a new form of art. While it may not be fair to judge the popularity of the music video as a cultural step backward, neither can we consider it, in its display of violence and sexist attitudes, a cultural step forward. Music video can be thought of as a step timed to society, a form that meets a new criterion of entertainment.
Music videos did for music what television did to radio; in fact, MTV is a television station for videos. Before music video, listening was a more active process. The listener created a personal image of the song. With MTV, however, so compelling is the visual image that it imprints on the brain, the song cannot be divorced from the video. This phenomenon resembles television's "laugh tracks" in that not only is the television showing us a picture but it's telling us what we should think is funny. In this sense, music videos do not require the viewer's active attention or imagination.
Music video does provide a place where new and important film techniques can be tried and developed. The Cars' video, which won best video of 1984, exemplifies this stage of technological advancement. This video employed some of the most recent discoveries in film computer graphics. Music video can help exploit new ways of using film as an artistic expression.
While the methods used by music videos might be new and innovative, the content seems stereotypical and trite. The figure of women in music videos is a large part of this stereotyped content. The "Spellbound" video by the group Triumph is a good example of the treatment of women. The video shows a man driving at night, and as he approaches a nebulous figure his car starts to break apart. When he sees that the figure is a woman with fluffed-out hair, wearing ripped white fabric, the car falls completely apart. He emerges from the wreckage and follows her in a trance. She stops to let him reach her, kisses him, and turns him into a statue. The video ends with the band playing the song on stage with the statue. The video suggests that, while women may be beautiful, they possess evil powers that will be the downfall of men. Modern props notwithstanding, this woman is a version of the Medusa who has been turning men to stone for centuries.
Regressing to an earlier stage than classical myth, people in music video frequently dress in tribal garb. We see people in tattered clothing, nonhuman hair styles, jungle skins, and face paint. Although the medium is new, then, these painted creatures portray the primitive thrust of music video. A typical example is the "Talk to Me" video by the group Iam Siam, which shows a young girl taken by force to some tribal ritual where she is encircled by natives wearing face paint and loincloths. Watching this happen is a bald person painted blue and white from top to bottom. He decides to rescue this woman from the ceremony and, once he gets her back to safety, he touches her, instantly transforming her to a creature with the same paint job. Although music video advances technologies, it returns ideologically to a primitive state.
The concept of the music video invades our lives in other ways than just on television. Movies that appear to be nothing more than two-hour music videos are becoming popular. The Talking Heads' movie Stop Making Sense is nothing more than an extended music video. Clearly the toleration for this new art form reflects popular taste; Flashdance and Footloose are other immense successes that reflect the music video mode. Who is the audience for the hard-imaged, fantastical, and sometimes amusing but always loud and rhythmic sounds? What, if anything, does the form tell us about our culture?
If music video is art, it is art you can do your homework to. It speaks of a culture that loves gimmicks and quick fixes and noise. MTV has a mesmerizing effect, almost hypnotizing us and offering a visual counterpart to a drugged state. Like a dope peddler, the video station fosters addiction by promising total coverage: we can watch it all the time; we never have to give it up. It reflects our culture's fascination with and, more ominously, return to a more primitive state. There is no subtlety; every idea and theme is spelled out, not once but many times. Natives beat drums, beat their chests, and beat women. Women, conversely, are the stereotypical downfall of men. Music video is quintessentially modern because it's so thin: quickly replaced, dispassionate, disposable. In the nuclear age, MTV is us.
I Want My MTV
by Matthew A. Munich
The concept of the music video, a short film in which video images interpret a song, is not a new one. The beginnings date as far back as the 1960s in the Beatles' full-length film A Hard Day's Night or later in the Rolling Stones' movie Gimme Shelter. With cable television and some of its subsidiary channels, however, the music video has received a tremendous amount of attention and popularity. MTV, a channel devoted solely to showing music videos twenty-four hours a day, has made the music video not only a new medium but also a new form of art. While it may not be fair to judge the popularity of the music video as a cultural step backward, neither can we consider it, in its display of violence and sexist attitudes, a cultural step forward. Music video can be thought of as a step timed to society, a form that meets a new criterion of entertainment.
Music videos did for music what television did to radio; in fact, MTV is a television station for videos. Before music video, listening was a more active process. The listener created a personal image of the song. With MTV, however, so compelling is the visual image that it imprints on the brain, the song cannot be divorced from the video. This phenomenon resembles television's "laugh tracks" in that not only is the television showing us a picture but it's telling us what we should think is funny. In this sense, music videos do not require the viewer's active attention or imagination.
Music video does provide a place where new and important film techniques can be tried and developed. The Cars' video, which won best video of 1984, exemplifies this stage of technological advancement. This video employed some of the most recent discoveries in film computer graphics. Music video can help exploit new ways of using film as an artistic expression.
While the methods used by music videos might be new and innovative, the content seems stereotypical and trite. The figure of women in music videos is a large part of this stereotyped content. The "Spellbound" video by the group Triumph is a good example of the treatment of women. The video shows a man driving at night, and as he approaches a nebulous figure his car starts to break apart. When he sees that the figure is a woman with fluffed-out hair, wearing ripped white fabric, the car falls completely apart. He emerges from the wreckage and follows her in a trance. She stops to let him reach her, kisses him, and turns him into a statue. The video ends with the band playing the song on stage with the statue. The video suggests that, while women may be beautiful, they possess evil powers that will be the downfall of men. Modern props notwithstanding, this woman is a version of the Medusa who has been turning men to stone for centuries.
Regressing to an earlier stage than classical myth, people in music video frequently dress in tribal garb. We see people in tattered clothing, nonhuman hair styles, jungle skins, and face paint. Although the medium is new, then, these painted creatures portray the primitive thrust of music video. A typical example is the "Talk to Me" video by the group Iam Siam, which shows a young girl taken by force to some tribal ritual where she is encircled by natives wearing face paint and loincloths. Watching this happen is a bald person painted blue and white from top to bottom. He decides to rescue this woman from the ceremony and, once he gets her back to safety, he touches her, instantly transforming her to a creature with the same paint job. Although music video advances technologies, it returns ideologically to a primitive state.
The concept of the music video invades our lives in other ways than just on television. Movies that appear to be nothing more than two-hour music videos are becoming popular. The Talking Heads' movie Stop Making Sense is nothing more than an extended music video. Clearly the toleration for this new art form reflects popular taste; Flashdance and Footloose are other immense successes that reflect the music video mode. Who is the audience for the hard-imaged, fantastical, and sometimes amusing but always loud and rhythmic sounds? What, if anything, does the form tell us about our culture?
If music video is art, it is art you can do your homework to. It speaks of a culture that loves gimmicks and quick fixes and noise. MTV has a mesmerizing effect, almost hypnotizing us and offering a visual counterpart to a drugged state. Like a dope peddler, the video station fosters addiction by promising total coverage: we can watch it all the time; we never have to give it up. It reflects our culture's fascination with and, more ominously, return to a more primitive state. There is no subtlety; every idea and theme is spelled out, not once but many times. Natives beat drums, beat their chests, and beat women. Women, conversely, are the stereotypical downfall of men. Music video is quintessentially modern because it's so thin: quickly replaced, dispassionate, disposable. In the nuclear age, MTV is us.
Reader Response
Reader Response Essay Format For 8th Grade English
Summary:
Briefly summarize what you think the essay is about: what is the main idea, what is the thesis, what is the author trying to get across, etc.
Positive Elements:
Write about any elements in the essay which you think work well. Be as specific as you can--don't just say "the first four paragraphs are particularly good." Say why the things work for you as a reader.
Constructive Criticism:
Point out the things in the essay that don't work, and explain why. This is the most important part of your reader response. Don't take it lightly.
Using Sources:
Has the author successfully used any sources? Is the original clearly attributed?
Summary:
Briefly summarize what you think the essay is about: what is the main idea, what is the thesis, what is the author trying to get across, etc.
Positive Elements:
Write about any elements in the essay which you think work well. Be as specific as you can--don't just say "the first four paragraphs are particularly good." Say why the things work for you as a reader.
Constructive Criticism:
Point out the things in the essay that don't work, and explain why. This is the most important part of your reader response. Don't take it lightly.
Using Sources:
Has the author successfully used any sources? Is the original clearly attributed?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)