When will we cut through the Gordian Knot of spin-based bullshit and admit that US culture is based on a lie of unending growth? When will we teach our charges the wisdom to confront “those Truths?”

And yes, Language and Rhetoric… in the Classical and Traditional sense… are indeed capable of slicing the knot. “Audience-based prose” is a Lamarckian lie.

Didn’t Aristotle show us the failure of “packaging” with his delicious “cup-o-soup?” He believed it. He practiced it. He died for it. But when the gap between “Truth” and “packaging” becomes so great, the Philosopher must die or join the torchlght parade.

Do we choose to be an Aristotle or a Wittgenstein?

Why is “audience preoccupation” misguided? The writers know it’s bullshit. There IS no “audience” except whoever is grading their paper… and whatever the grader’s perception of this hypothetical “audience’s” hypothetical perception is.

Writers should first engage the Truth. Melville’s Typee is an excellent example, as he was chided for not repeating Typee’s “audience-beloved” formula with Moby-Dick. Hurston is another example, flamed for writing in “dialect.”

While “moving from writer-based to reader-based prose” is grounded in good intentions, it is a pale shadow of the “customer-focused” philosophy of the corporate world, which is a poor mimicry of Deming’s dance.

In the corporate world, “quality” of the product has morphed into “creating shareholder value,” another bucket of bullshit that actually means “get the stock numbers to go up” with whatever fictional accounting is necessary.

It’s a good sign that “bullshit” has entered into the lexicon of the multiple Cs. “For in this world of lies,” said Melville, “Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth,–even though it be covertly, and by snatches.”

The liar makes false claims. The bullshitter cares nothing about truth or falsity, only for impressing the audience; and, as Frankfurt has said, “By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” Writing is part of the great “Art of Telling the Truth,” joined Janus-like with the art of Reading.

We could dissect Douglas’ “rhetorical technique,” masticate his metaphor, and miss the point: “Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.”

This is just a humble attempt at end-of-the-sem agitation for Truth Telling among the “paperwork pedagogy.”

The overwhelming majority of monographs in composition are worthless, everybody who teaches composition hates literature, compositionists teach the journalistic inverted triangle format, and contemporary rhetoric has a misguided preoccupation with audience that leads to an inability or refusal to perceive and communicate Truths.

Have I got it right?

If so, I must say you’ve clearly and admirably embodied your own credo in your adamant opposition to engaging an audience. Good luck with those Truths.

And dig this: they hate Literature. It’s no big secret that there’s a great divide in the “English” department between those who teach “composition” and those who teach Literature. We Comp grunts are the poor handmaidens, doing (what Robert Scholes calls) the “shitwork” of the English department. Hardly any Comp “experts” will admit in their tedious tomes that they hate Literature. Only in the hallway.

No, they like the stand-up “journalism” style of writing… the inverted triangle… piss on a page. Lead your brainless reader by the nose; give them “objective facts.” Writers in the “scientific” disciplines blow these hacks in the weeds. Hacks still don’t get it. “Content” means nothing. Packaging is everything. In a sense they are right. If you look at the horseshit that passes for “public discourse,” you might almost believe them.

Please don’t. In our obsession with “audience,” we are teaching “spin.” “Spin” is not writing. It’s bullshit. So if you cover bullshit with chocolate, you can get your “audience” to eat it? Only if your “audience” is terminally stupid, this is the bedrock assumption of contemporary “rhetoric.” Literature attempts to tell the Truth by probing (as Melville said) at the “axis of reality.” How “vague” is that?

But “guiding your reader” through such heavy thoughts as “smoking on campus” or “college sports” prepares one for pursuit of excellence or some such pabulum.

ALL are punished!

Someone indeed might look at the Chronicle and note that English majors comprised 53,162 bachelors degrees out of a total of 1,291,900 — or roughly 4.1 percent. Is that “no more English majors”? Perhaps compared to the 21.9 percent who major in Business and Marketing — but is Engineering in crisis, as well, with only 4.6 percent of total baccalaureate degrees? Computers and Information Sciences, with only 3.6 percent? Mathematics and Architecture, both with less than 1 percent?

And what is the cause-effect relationship you’re pointing out? Does something about my account of Robillard’s presentation suggest some sort of crisis to you? And here I was under the impression that the 400 percent ramp-up in the overproduction of English PhDs through the 1960s and 1970s, and the subsequent job market bust to the point today where we’ve got a 46 percent job placement rate for PhDs in the field, was our significant logistical problem.

But apparently you’d locate what you seem to think is some sort of crisis in the nature of Robillard’s presentation. Can you be more explicit?

But hell, we all know I’m disillusioned from ‘way back.