Lang pol extras

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This page may still get minor changes ;-)

Students are likely not to need these materials for the test. If that is your purpose, please go to JLI! and sign up and look around, then to study instructions, then to class materials.

BTW

We may not have really discussed this stuff in class, but a link was somehow generated in the course of classroom events.

This topic proved prophetic, given subsequent controversy over satire.
  • Persuasion was treated nicely in a Times article recommended by Mr. Fazzina.
  • Orwell is bound to come up any time we talk about language in politics and Ms. Brenta pointed out some parallels between his essay Politics_and_the_English_Language and Fairclough 1989 (see "links" in JLI! course).

Fun Matters

This subheading is a pun. One meaning is like "entertaining stuff." Another is that enjoyment is important.

Other Listening Passages

These are radio segments Grew tossed out for students to pick up if interested. Though the items were not in fact picked up (and thus never made it into class discussion), they still may serve as listening practice or as a source of key vocabulary for the course. Most also have transcripts available, though Grew recommends putting the downloaded mp3 on your phone to listen to while on the bus. Anyway, this stuff is not essential for the exam, but might be fun or helpful.

L'esprit de l'escalier

The English expression "staircase wit" really cannot do justice to this idea because it lacks the seminal ambiguity of the original. Although "wit" bears both the sense of "consciousness" and that of "humor," the French embraces more of the idea of "mind," which is a troubling concept. Be that as it may, there is always a twinge of regret in esprit de l'escalier: we are all heirs to Diderot. As for Grew, in this case any sense of regret is easily overwhelmed by immense satisfaction over the _Language_in_Politics_ course on the whole. Two untreated details, however, do stand out, both under the rubric of the three Jacksons, which, unlike the three McCarthys, was left partly blank. The only Jackson dealt with was Jesse, who fit so well into a dolly shot of twentieth-century American rhetoric.

Cold War by Jackson

After Grew said he wanted to play a music video to cover the Cold War in just minutes, Hamilton recommended Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire", which packs a slew of American headline events from the second half of the twentieth century into a few minutes and would have taken Grew more than a 60-hour course to analyze ;-). The official video for that song is certainly worth a watch and the speed of the lyrics is no impediment to understanding iconic photographs of executions from the period like that of Nguyễn Văn Lém or Lee Harvey Oswald, which you should recognize.

The music video Grew actually wanted to use deals directly with a moment during the Cold War per se and is a period piece in its own right, having not only won awards at the time but also now recalling a bygone genre, the MTV music video hit, complete with iconic, vintage special effects. "Jackson" is the first name in this case and, in addition to lyrics that emblematically portray an attitude widespread among 1983 Americans, the singer turns actor to take aim at the construction of the Other so essential to the treatment we read about in Lawton. In hindsight, the song seems prescient if we consider that Yuri Andropov was still general secretary and Mikhail Gorbachev was to assume that role only two years hence. To Grew, the song represents the moment that signaled the beginning of the denouement of the Cold War, something nearly as important as the two phrasal verbs at the beginning.

Jackson for Labor

Grew was reminded of the untold story of the three Jacksons after class had ended when the December 1 New York Times Magazine ran an article by Pankaj Mishradec about the Dalai Lama that contained this gem: "he was a mascot of globalization in its early phase, between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In that innocent era, the universal triumph of liberal capitalism and democracy seemed assured, as new nation-states appeared across Europe and Asia, the European Union came into being, apartheid in South Africa ended and peace was declared in Northern Ireland."

The "innocent era" referred to relates directly to the ideas of Fukuyama, whose work has done much to establish Denmark as an icon and whose article | The Future of History: Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class? (full access to which can be made through the university proxy) was mentioned a couple of times in class. The article prepares us for a now-dawning era in which liberal democracy is no longer the default striven-for political system. Other countries will no longer be striving to emulate Denmark, Fukuyama predicts. This represents a huge change in some sort of consensus view of society, a paradigm shift. It is happening before our eyes and Fukuyama ends his magazine piece with a call to the upcoming generation to tackle the problem.

In tracing the beginnings of these shared ideals, the universal values on which the sun may now be setting, Fukuyama writes about property ownership that: "Andrew Jackson’s election as U.S. president in 1828 and his subsequent abolition of property requirements for voting, at least for white males, thus marked an important early victory for a more robust democratic principle." Andrew Jackson is the symbol of the Democratic Party, the one on ballots that corresponds to Abraham Lincoln for the Republican Party. He brought into U.S. politics the idea of the "common man" and set the scene for the party to come to represent labor about a century later. There is our third Jackson. He's the one on the twenty-dollar bill. And money is labor, of course, just as surely as time is money. Money, however, is not time. Nor can it buy me love.

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