Claiming and Complicating the New Elite

Charles Murray has an editorial in today's Washington Post. It outlines the rise and reality of what Murray (following Tea Party leaders and others on the right) call the "New Elite."

The interesting thing for me about reading Murray's critique of this new elite (its insularity, its class rarification, and, most of all, its distance from the lives of "real Americans") is the way that I feel simultaneously included and excluded from the category and the flaws that such overlapped hailing and hindering reveals in Murray's larger argument.

This post, by the way, is flawed from the outset because I am going to rely on anecdotes and vague memories of statistical reports rather than careful documentation of my claims. In many ways, my post shares this flaw with Murray's editorial.

Let me begin by saying that I am, in many ways, a member of Murray's New Elite. I am unfamiliar with each of the "quintessentially American things" Murray introduces to show that the New Elite live "in a world that doesn't intersect with mainstream America." I don't know who replaced Bob Barker on "The Price is Right." I've never watched an episode of Oprah and have no idea who Jimmie Johnson is (but I can refer accurate to yoga poses and know a fair bit about skiing). The acronym MMA does, indeed, "mean nothing to [me]" and I haven't read a "Left Behind" novel or been on a cruise ship. And, even if graduate school did count, I haven't spend a year with a family income below the poverty line, I have no close friends who are evangelical Christians, and I have never worked on a factory floor.

Let's add an additional detail or two: I have a Ph.d.. That alone places me in company with just .7% of the US population. I'm a University professor - the ultimate in liberal elite. I have a passport and have traveled to two other continents (and feel a bit chagrined that it's only *two* others). I drop money on health care for a dog that many people wouldn't be able to spend on health care for their children. Our current credit card debt is the first such debt I've had in my life, and it will be gone very soon. I could go on (and on and on). I can name a handful of friends and family who do not have college decrees, but most people I know have more that four years of post-secondary education. I know a few people who would label themselves "conservatives," but many people I know wonder if "liberal" is too tame a term for themselves.

If anyone has made a place for herself in Murray's New Elite, it's me. Indeed, I often worry about my stratified life and the class and race barriers it enables. I am aware of my extreme privilege, especially in a global context, and I am also occasionally reminded of how taken-for-granted that privilege is for me. My awareness usually does nothing to change my behavior, and I'm liberal (and Lutheran) enough to feel useless guilt over that. I take Murray's point about our isolation from one another, the increasing (yet also more hidden) lines of class and privilege that divide us and form embankments of hostility, misunderstanding, or simply ignorance between individuals and communities.

And yet, even the way I re-phrase Murray's point shows the complexities that my own experience (and, perhaps, my liberal perspective) would introduce into his divide between the "New Elite" and "real Americans."

Let me offer a few of those complexities: Murray scoffs that the "New Elite" has never lived in a small town or in an urban neighborhood in which most of their neighbors did not have college degrees (he adds "gentrifying neighborhoods don't count" as if any of us live in static neighborhoods). As I think about my highly educated, professional friends, I can barely think of a single one who *hasn't* lived in at least one of those contexts, even if we today live in elitist liberal cities. We grew up in New Ulm, Minnesota; Idaho Falls, ID; Wausau, WI; Harrisburg, IL; Twin Lakes, WI... We've lived in urban neighborhoods that might, by Murray's standards, be called "gentrifying," but they were still filled with "real Americans": immigrants, school teachers, social workers, political activists, welfare recipients, nurses, non-profit administrators (hmm, I may be tipping my hand here...).

Similarly, while I have ten years of post-secondary education, only one of those years was spent in a school that Murray would accept as prestigious or selective. St Olaf, NYU (the one year), and the University of Illinois are good schools that do, indeed, have trouble maintaining diversity in terms of both race and class, but they don't quite evoke the dons and secret societies of the Oligarchs (St. Olaf, in particular, is more likely to evoke the Golden Girls).

And those two previous paragraphs begin to show the thing that makes me sure that Murray's "New Elite, and not real American" thesis is fundamentally flawed, even if the facts he cites do point to a real problem of internal isolation and separation. The "New Elite" is far more complex and has far more diverse life experience than Murray wants to allow even as his point about the homogenous social values of that group does hold water. Similarly, even if we grant Murray's crowning of "real Americans" as a category distinct from "New Elite" (a point I am loathe to concede, feeling rather solidly real and utterly American), his suggestion of that group's defining characteristics seem woefully limited. Murray's real American is a Christian (reads "Left Behind" novels), probably of an evangelical bent; watches football and goes on cruises, but sometimes earns less than twice the poverty line; works on a factory floor (or used to, before neoliberal policies moved that factory job elsewhere); and is a member of the Kiwanis club.

By the facts provided, Murray's real American is male, I think. Rural, it seems. White, most of the time. I'm sure this is not, in fact, how Murray would describe a real American. It is the picture his anecdotal descriptions give, though.

What matters here is not that Murray's sketch is itself classist or racist or sexist. I'm not sure it really is. What matters is that his sketch of the real American is as rarified, as unusual, as partial as his sketch of the New Elite.

It is essential that we Americans (all of the very real and very varied folks who make up that rather rarified in itself category) pay attention to the ways that we are increasing divided from one another. That we look at how homogeneous our social circles often become.

It is equally essential that we cut the crap about a simple divide between "Elites" and "real Americans." Not least because "real Americans" are about as divided and as varied a group as one could put together out of several million people.

Imagined Communities

"Benedict Anderson has persuaded me that nations --and all other collectivities except the most intimate-- are, indeed, "imagined" rather than known" (Gregory Clark, Rhetorical Landscapes in America, 15).

Every once in a while, I wonder what it must be like to be Benedict Anderson. The man introduced us all to the idea that nations are "imagined communities" and, for that singular insight, he is cited repeatedly, appearing in almost every publication in English that treats the idea of the nation (or even of community) even in the most cursory sense.

Like pretty much everyone else, I find Anderson's titular innovation useful. I've cited in a few times, myself. I think he's right about "imagined communities."

The problem is that while Anderson's concept "imagined communities" has captured scholarly imaginations in a fairly profound way, his argument in the book Imagined Communities, the argument about how nations as imagined communities first came into being (in the Americas during the end of the colonial period), has been roundly debunked. He cites print culture as the mechanism by which residents begin to imagine themselves as part of a nation, but in the Americas prior to the second half of the 19th century (or even, in some cases ...cough ... Ecuador... prior to the second quarter of the 20th century)there was little in the way of print circulation. In several, if not most, cases, nation-states emerged well before national feeling, the opposite order from what Anderson says occurred.

Which is all just to say that it must be a little strange to be Benedict Anderson. So completely and utterly right and yet also entirely wrong. So known for a simple but profound phrase, so cited for that singular phrase, so incredibly influential ... all grounded in a reading of history that simply didn't happen the way you said it did.

I think we are all better off for Anderson's formulation. I wonder, though, if the fame is a bit bittersweet.

Ways of [Not] Seeing

I am making a wave of final revisions to my dissertation prior to depositing it. One of my revision tasks is to provide a bit more metacommentary about the images I discuss, to elaborate on how I chose the images and how I know that they show what I say they do. Pursuing that revision task, of course, has me thinking about whether I do, in fact, know what I am seeing, or rather, what serves as convincing evidence (even to myself) that I have seen in a way consistent with the historical period and geographical location about which I write.

I know already that seeing is not, as it were, transparent. It is highly contextual. I was reminded of that recently as I re-read portions of John Berger's classic collection of essays Ways of Seeing. In one of those essays, Berger discusses a photograph showing three men, dressed in suits, standing on a country road. Much of Berger's point hinges on his assertion that those men do not usually wear suits, they are peasants. He points to their posture and to the ways that the suits fit as well as to their hands and faces to suggest that these men are, in a sense, in costume, removed from the everyday of typical peasant life. To cement his point, Berger offers another photo, this one of a group of aristocrats dressed in suits. Berger points out not only the quality of how the suits fit, but also what he describes as the obvious comfort of the men in their suits. He suggests that the suits and the men look right together (apologies for not having the photos, they don't appear to be available online).

I'm away from my bookshelves right now and have forgotten Berger's overall point, but his reading of the images has stuck with me, in large part because that reading was largely opaque to me. Confronted with the comparison, I was able to, up to a point, sort out the differences between the aristocrats and the peasants. Given only the original three men, I was essentially taking Berger's word for it. I could tell from the setting that the men were probably not aristocrats, that they were probably, in fact, workers dressed-up for something special. I could not, however, read the sense of comfort/discomfort in the look of the suit itself, and that inability has stuck with me, worried me ever sense.

Being back in D.C., I have had ample opportunity to observe men in suits and I believe that I have begun to understand why it is so difficult for me to see as Berger does (this realization has not, however, been particularly helpful in calming my worries about my ability to see other images). Berger was writing in the 1960s about photos from the early part of the 20th century. I read Berger and look at those pictures from the perspective of the early 21st century. In the forty-some years since Berger wrote, I suggest, the way men wear suits has shifted such that my ability to read class in cut and comfort is befuddled.

I do not know any men who regularly get suits tailored just for them. Lawyers, pastors, pipefitters ... they all wear suits of their size that they bought off a rack. Even the most high-power of the men I see walking across Capitol Hill are, I'm fairly certain, wearing suits that fit more like the peasants in Ways of Seeing than like the aristocrats. The Capitol Hill politicos may look somewhat more comfortable in their suits than those three men (the former do, after all, wear their suits every day), but they do not look so much like they were born to them. We 21st century Americans inhabit a more casual world than either the peasants or the aristocrats from Berger's photos. The smiling, talking man in a suit who sits across the coffee shop from me right now sits on a bar stool as if he were wearing jeans like his companion. His suit pants hike up to show his socks; his suit jacket pulls a bit at his shoulders; his tie is tight to his neck, but still slightly askew. This is not abnormal and this man likely wears a suit to work every day. And, more to the point, his way of wearing that suit is what suit-wearing looks like to me, even in DC's formal, quasi-aristocratic context.

My ways of seeing suits today, in other words, makes it hard for me to see the peasant men in Ways of Seeing as Berger does. I assume, because Berger has sufficient ethos in this regard, that he is seeing these photos in a way consistent with their original era, but Berger does not particularly elaborate on how he knows that the original viewers of such photos would have seen what he sees. That is unfortunate, I think, since it would be a useful model. In the absence of that model, I am left to remember how I taught myself to see Ecuadorian images from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to interrogate that way of seeing as best I can to determine how well in hews to its moment.

Five Things to Know

1) Sofitel pretty much rocks the house.

2) We have amazing families and amazing friends. Whoa. Everyone should be as lucky.

3) By some calculations, I'm a doctor now. This still doesn't seem real to me and won't, I believe, until May when I officially graduate.

4) My life would be improved approximately .5892% by a pair of black boots to wear with dress pants. There is a slight possibility that percentage could increase dramatically in the next several weeks. Shockingly, fairly open dress shoes make for chilly winter-time walking.

5) It does not take very long (3 days, actually) for me to get used to seeing myself in a suit. It takes far less time (3 seconds, give-or-take) for me to readjust to snuggling on the couch with my human and canine companions, looking forward to a long spring.

Justifications

The other day, I attended an interesting talk on rhetorical practice in a region and time period that has rarely drawn the attention of U.S. rhetorical scholars and that, in those rare moments, has been dismissed or denigrated by U.S. scholars who take the history of Greco-Roman rhetoric as their universalized frame for understanding and evaluating rhetorical practice in any context.

The speaker gave an in-depth introduction to the inscription practices of hir region/period and suggested that rhetorical study needs to pay attention to the interesting history and practice that came from there/then. Ze also raised the question of whether "Rhetoric" is the proper term to describe the practices ze laid out, given the term's particular foundation in the traditions of Aristotle and the Sophists, in a logo-centric context*, in a history of terms and assumptions.**

Unfortunately, the speaker omitted a perhaps obvious, but incredibly important step in his argument, a step that would have moved his speak away from the paradigm that Virginia Dominguez gently terms the "rescue project" and into the realm of (again, Dominguez) a "politics of love and rescue." That step is to move beyond the impulse of "we should pay attention to this period/place because it's interesting and we haven't paid attention before" and into an argument for why, beyond a recognition of previous neglect, rhetorical studies needs to pay attention. Into, in other words, a direct articulation of what the study of rhetoric gains from such attention, how a change from "history of rhetoric" to "histories of rhetoric" might both challenge and enrich our ability to understand practices of persuasion and identification.

To hir credit, the speaker did ask us to imagine how the study and even the definition of rhetoric would be different if it were hir period, not the Greco-Roman period, that served as starting point. However, ze did not guide us into that investigation, did not lay out for us the contributions that I believe can be made by greater attention to hir region and period.

Because omitting the justification for such expansion in how we in the US think about "rhetoric" feels like a threat to the work that I am doing, I want to take a few moments here to launch a general defense of the study of what might problematically be called 'other' rhetorics. Though I cannot make this argument for the specific region/period covered by the speaker, I believe there are some general reasons for broadening and re-examining our received definitions of rhetoric.

First on my list is the reminder that those of us introducing new regions to the study of rhetoric are not, in fact, doing anything so terribly different from our colleagues who, in recent years, have argued that the "history of rhetoric" ought to include the histories of women, people of color, and the everyday or that definitions of rhetoric should make room for the persuasive, identificatory force of images, space, and culture. These colleagues have argued convincingly that "rhetoric" is diminished by a slavish adherence to the doctrine of the "good man speaking well." They have shown, more importantly, that it never was just the "good man speaking well." What we know as *the* rhetorical tradition is chock full of images and bodies, of women and slaves, of foreigners and interlopers. We cannot, these colleagues argue, understand rhetoric, even rhetoric as we think we know it, if we simply accept the lacunae and erasures that have come to use via long histories of European bias. Similarly, those of us who focus on regions previously neglected (i.e. the vast majority of the globe) can argue that there is no justifiable claim to understanding the "available means of persuasion" if vast traditions of rhetorical practice are summarily ignored. Indeed, even those who remain staunchly committed to the study of "Western" traditions must realize that their traditions are fundamentally influenced by those vast realms of the not-West. As the speaker pointed out, Aristotle was not a European. I would add, Alexandria was not a European locale. Augustine of Hippo was not a European. And, perhaps more importantly, the history of colonialism brought syncretic practices into existence, required the adaptation of rhetorical modes, and influenced key periods of transformation (like the Enlightenment).

In addition (and this point was implicit in the speaker's argument), broader study of rhetoric often gives new and definitive support for arguments suggesting that rhetorical force can be found in a wide array of human practices. Articulating the different means of persuasion and identification at work in a given context can provide new terms for rhetorical theorizing, contributing either new applications of existing terms or contributing new terms for understanding previously unrecognized rhetorical behavior. It is in this context, for example, that I plan sometime to return to Guaman Poma's 1615 "Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno" to study the dialogue on the subject of good government that Poma imagines occurring between himself and the king of Spain. Poma's re-interpretation of a feature of Western rhetorical history (i.e. Alcuin's dialogue with Charlemagne) should offer us important new insight into that tradition and the syncretic rhetorical practice that Poma developed.

Of course, any specific project will carry specific contributions to be articulated. Given the ease with which such efforts to expand the purview of rhetoric can be dismissed as simply "not rhetoric," it is of utmost importance for us to make clear the many ways that a more expansive study of rhetoric strengthens and challenges the field.



*An additional difficulty I had with this talk was its insistence on the heritage of Greco-Roman rhetoric as language-based. The deluge of recent scholarship on the importance of visual artifacts and bodily comportment to ancient ideas of rhetoric ought to remind us that the assumption of the ancients' logo-centrism tells us more about our biases than the actual rhetorical practices of the Greeks and Romans.

**I also had objections to the either/or construct offered here and the underlying assumption that we must either define rhetoric as "big-R" Greco-Roman rhetoric (and thereby find new terms to refer to practices growing from different contexts) or entirely reject the useful terms and histories that US scholars have inherited from Greek, Rome, and Europe in order to make space for a more pluralistic set of rhetorics. I won't go into that larger argument here, but will simply note that while I don't believe that all rhetorical practice can be interpreted using the terminologies that we've inherited from Greece and Rome, I do believe that it would be ridiculous to therefore declare those traditions useless for approaching anything other than ancient Greco-Roman (and perhaps European) rhetorical histories. If we have any claim to the heritage of "available means of persuasion," we ought to be able to conceive of a more flexible approach to rhetoric.

Three Realizations

1. It's really a pain to open a can without a can opener. Those ridiculous little things on utility knives that are called "can openers" are really just a form of frustration torture. It's also lucky that I didn't slip and open a major vein while trying to use said torture device.

2. I was completely remiss in deciding not to buy basil at the farmers' market. There is never a good reason to not have basil on hand when one has fresh tomatoes.

3. A good 85% of my fondness for Champaign-Urbana is a direct result of my fondness for the people I know/knew here. The fact that more than half of the people whose company I enjoy have left is going to mean that the remaining few will have to work overtime...

Things you learn during 8 hours in a hot car

1. I was very much a child when I bought my red 1997 escort wagon, at least when it came to major purchases like cars. Despite my apparent adulthood and ability to drive and drink (though not at the same time, naturally), I decidedly didn't have a clue what I was doing.

2. The escort's lack of air conditioning and tape/cd player and cruise control are evidence of this general cluelessness.

3. Today is the 40th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix playing that famous feedback-rich rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at the last day of Woodstock.

4. Today is also the 40th birthday of Donny Wahlberg of the New Kids on the Block (this thing is hereby designated "I feel old, part 1").

5. Also, according to a radio station in west central Wisconsin, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" and Guns n Roses' "November Rain" are now "classic rock" ("I feel old, part 2").

6. Trips go faster if you stop less often.

7. Ceisaf still recognizes the streets leading to our Champaign home.

8. The next car will have ac, a cd player/ipod jack, and cruise control.