Does capitalism have a particular teleology? If those who believe strongly in the virtues of unfettered free-market capitalism were to think teleologically, what ideal end-state would they imagine, and for whom?

Popular critiques of vulgar or orthodox Marxism understand its ideal goal to consist of class struggle leading to socialist revolution followed by a worker’s utopia wherein “after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (Critique of the Gotha Program). Critiques of various forms of Marxism that admit a more sophisticated understanding still often find a solid target in teleologies that imagine some remedy to the appropriation of unpaid labor and a loosening of the bourgeoisie’s private ownership of the means of production: so, yes, Marxisms by definition often imagine some future circumstance toward which they work.

Do the advocates of free-market competition similarly imagine some ideal future circumstance — and if so, what does it look like?

critique of the would-be inheritors of Paulo Freire and James Berlin.

As an antidote: Shaughnessy, Smitherman, small doses of Bartholomae. Plus a pin, one prick, to puncture that balloon of pedagogical sanctimoniousness.

This year, the Henry Ossian Flipper dinner was open to faculty, and I went. It was a fine event. The dinner celebrates the first black American cadet to graduate from West Point, and celebrates as well a cadet who graduated under the most challenging of circumstances, and who served his country and lived his life, quotidian, under those same circumstances.

There’s a lesson to be had not only from Lieutenant Flipper, but from the cadets: a lesson that challenge, that difficulty, is quotidian, for some more than others. (Lieutenant Flipper’s account of his time as a cadet is genuinely remarkable, and well worth reading.) In 1877, Henry O. Flipper became the first African-American to graduate from the United States Military Academy, and in 1881 he was court-martialed for embezzlement and for conduct unbecoming an officer, and was dismissed from the Army in 1882 upon conviction on the latter charge.

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People in my academic discipline sometimes conflate “military” and “war.” From what I’ve seen of the broader scape of academe, that’s not uncommon. In listserv discussions, interactions at conferences, calls for proposals, and hallway conversations, there’s a common assumption that any association with the military must commit one to a monolithic and intolerant ideology supporting all war, always, in all contexts.

Two nights ago, on Monday, Eugene Jarecki showed up on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart promoting his new book. (Jarecki wrote and directed the award-winning 2005 documentary Why We Fight, which — while voluminously researched and attempting to provide the appearance of scrupulous fairness — mostly did a very good job for 99 minutes of proving that Jarecki agreed with the cautions offered in Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” speech: to paraphrase a number of critics, the movie was an op-ed piece, not investigative reporting.) He had some good things to say about today’s links between the defense industry and American foreign policy, and with Stewart’s prompting and assistance, he made a number of solid points fully and clearly in the nine minutes or so that he had.

Stewart’s a breezy interviewer, and I think Jarecki would have fared better with a more deliberate pace, perhaps even with being asked to read a passage from the book out loud, NPR-style, though that seldom plays well on television. (Would that it did.) I say this because Jarecki was invited here to West Point to talk to people — cadets and faculty — about his movie after its release, and accounts of those conversations have traveled, some of them making their way into his new book, and some of them making their way into our Dean’s annual address to faculty — all faculty, military and civilian — where I first heard them two months ago. I quote here from Jarecki’s book, The American Way of War, published ten days ago:

Located in wooded isolation some 50 miles north of New York City, West Point is very much in its own intellectual orbit, not entirely removed from the workings of the American defense establishment, yet not entirely in sync with them either. On my first drive there, I recall the incredulity with which friends and family reacted when I called from the road to tell them where I was going. They were surprised that a military academy would even show a film like Why We Fight, let alone invite a self-acknowledged critic of U.S. defense policy, to address its best and brightest.

As it turns out, this incredulity reflects a prejudice that sweepingly and mistakenly equates bad foreign policy with those entrusted to implement it. While soldiers come in all types and no single generalization can be made, one finds inspiring abundance on West Point’s faculty of responsible thinkers who feel a responsibility not only to train their cadets in the military arts but to educate them more broadly about the strengths and weaknesses of the nation’s foreign policy system.

Jarecki’s words are a careful and instructive counter to the myopic conflation I describe above. When our Dean read those words, and conveyed them to the faculty with an argument about their importance, they helped me see something more about teaching at this place, and about why I’m teaching here and want to continue to teach here. The engagement with diverse and critical perspectives that Jarecki describes is something I’ve seen here far more than at any other college or university I’ve attended or taught at, and seen especially with a remarkable openness in the classroom.

It’s remarkable the things cadets are unafraid to say and the criticisms they’re unafraid to make, reasonably and professionally, and how calmly and precisely they’re able to disagree with one another on loaded issues, and then think nothing of it and move on to celebrate and support one another. (Mostly.) In my class, they’ve just finished a unit on multi-modal argument, with more than a few of them giving presentations on similar or identical topics in rapid succession, and the kaleidoscope of perspectives has been refreshingly more wide-ranging than some of the homogeneous arrays of ideological and rhetorical commonplaces I’ve seen elsewhere. And in many ways more liberally accepting; more embracing of what Benjamin Franklin called “all these scatter’d counsels.” That ideological diversity and tolerance strikes me as one of the most valuable assets that a democratic nation might promote in its military, and one that I wish I might see more of in academe’s broader scape.

Slate culture editor Meghan O’Rourke nails it, in as apt an analogy as I’ve seen: Sarah Palin is a character from a George Saunders short story. If you’ve read Saunders’ fiction, you know exactly what O’Rourke’s talking about; if you haven’t, Saunders writes a world shaped by the brand-name overconsumption, with its inhabitants tragicomically resigned and adapted to the dictatorial regime of consumerism. In O’Rourke’s words, Palin “buys into a whole vocabulary of signifiers that often don’t signify very much, and she scaffolds that lexicon with winks, smiles, and carefully mimed gestural reinforcement.”

It’s an attractive, pleasant, carefully calibrated empty clockwork face. That’s what I’d say I saw last night.

I’m not sure how enthusiastic I am about Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as a running mate — I remember the ways he embarrassed himself in past candidacies — but I think Obama, if he and his team are smart, can use Biden’s past criticisms of Obama with some rhetorical savvy to show how an Obama administration might value diverse perspectives, in contrast to the Bush administration’s echo chamber of the last eight years. But it got me thinking: who else would I like to see contributing their perspectives to a possible Obama administration?

Secretary of State: Hillary Clinton
Secretary of the Treasury: Warren Buffett
Secretary of Defense: Wesley Clark
Attorney General: Lawrence Lessig
Secretary of the Interior: Al Gore
Secretary of Agriculture: Carolyn Mugar
Secretary of Commerce: Joseph Stiglitz
Secretary of Education: Kathleen Blake Yancey

Well, sure, some of them are reaches, but it’s a wish list, a dream team. An assertion of hope about the direction in which we might go. And, yes, I’ve left off Labor, HHS, Transportation, Energy, VA, and Homeland Security. So I’ll ask: what would your choices be, reader? Who would you change or add?

I voted on Tuesday, and felt good. It’s a satisfying thing to do, isn’t it? There’s a small emotional high afterwards; a hopefulness, especially with primaries. A pleasant feeling about democratic processes.

My lesson plans for the two courses I’m teaching intersected with that pleasant feeling in interesting ways. I hadn’t figured the primaries into my syllabi, but in a nice bit of synchronicity, one course was responding to Ernest Renan’s “What Is a Nation?”, and the other course was responding to our Declaration of Independence and the documents Jefferson drew from in composing it.

But nobody in either course raised the question — despite that Super Bowl defeat — of what “patriot” might mean, and I’m curious about that silence. It’s a gendered term, of course, and so carries certain difficulties, but its semi-synonyms — “nationalist,” perhaps, for one — are even more troublesome to some.

Certainly, the students I teach can’t not be patriots, in the service they’ve volunteered to their country: one reason it doesn’t come up in discussion is that it’s beyond argument for them.

But I bet, readers, that some of you might not want to be labeled as patriots. So I’m curious: how has our sense of what it means to be a nation, or to be a patriot, or to declare allegiance to Renan’s patrie — how has that changed from 1776 to 1882 to today? On November 4, will you think of yourself as a patriot — and if so, or if not — why?

On March 31, 2006, John Schilb referred to Mark Bauerlein as “lazy and paranoid” in response to Bauerlein’s uninformed attack in a blog post at The Valve on that year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication, with the evidentiary basis of Bauerlein’s attack being a few presentation titles.

In what one might see as a generous attempt on Bauerlein’s part to confirm Schilb’s assessment, he’s recycled his 2006 blog post at The Valve into a 2008 blog post at The Chronicle Review, with exactly the same method (cherry-picking presentation titles) and exactly the same evidence (the 2006 conference program).

Congratulations are apparently in order to Mr. Huckabee, both for his win in Iowa and for his familiarity with the classical rhetorical figures. While I’m not in a position to say anything about Mr. Huckabee’s forthrightness or his politics, it was at least amusing to see him on December 31 taking advice more than 2,000 years old:

Occultatio est cum dicimus nos praeterire aut non scire aut nolle dicere id quod nun maxime dicimus, hoc modo: …”Non dico te ab sociis pecunias cepisse; non sum in eo occupatus quod civitates, regna, domos omnium depeculatus es; furta, rapinas omnes tuas omitto.” Haec utilis est exornatio si aut ad rem quam non pertineat aliis ostendere, quod occulte admonuisse prodest, aut longum est aut ignobile. Rhetorica ad Herennium IV.xxvi.37

In Harry Caplan’s 1954 translation:

Paralipsis occurs when we say that we are passing by, or do not know, or refuse to say precisely what we are now saying, as follows: … “I do not mention that you have taken monies from our allies; I do not concern myself with your having despoiled the cities, kingdoms, and homes of them all. I pass by your thieveries and robberies, all of them.” This figure is useful if employed in a matter which it is not pertinent to call specifically to the attention of others, because there is advantage in making only an indirect reference to is, or because the direct reference would be tedious and undignified.

Mr. Huckabee, it would seem, knows his pseudo-Cicero, although I’m not quite as inclined as the New York Times is to call his recent performance in telling reporters that he would not air his negative ad about Mr. Romney (and then showing them the ad he wouldn’t air) “remarkable,” unless it’s in his savvy deployment of paralipsis / occultatio / praeteritio by proxy. However, it did get me into an interesting discussion with a colleague of what the device is actually called. You’ll notice that Harry Caplan takes the Greek term paralipsis as a translation for the Latin occultatio, which is what my colleague wanted to call what Huckabee did, with the emphasis on hiding or obscuring. I had always understood the figure to be referred to as praeteritio, though, with the emphasis (as in pseudo-Cicero’s infinitive praeterire) on ostensibly passing something by, which seems more appropriate to the quoted examples.

So I’m left with a distinction that maybe isn’t a difference. I think paralipsis works fine as a catch-all term for the general practice of saying something by saying we’re not going to say it, but I kinda like the fine-grained distinction we see in the Ad Herennium between saying something by obscuring it (occultatio) and saying something by passing it by (praeteritio). Are they two different things?

And if so, which is the more appropriate term for what Mr. Huckabee did?

In this week’s New York Times Magazine, my colleague down the hall asks:

What does it mean for an undergraduate to pass the morning reading Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and the afternoon parachuting from a helicopter?

It’s a form of the question I’ve been asking myself in the year since I came here, and it’s a question she’s been asking herself much longer. I admire the way she extends the questions she poses into a meditation on the purposes of teaching, and I admire the conclusions she draws as well. Her article is the most thoughtful representation I’ve seen of what it means to teach here, of what it means to teach English here, and of what the productive complications teaching here might bring to the teaching of English. She’s working from the perspective of the teaching of literature, and some of the ways I look at concerns associated with the teaching of writing here are somewhat different — but for much of what she wrote, I found myself nodding my head and saying, “Yes, yes, yes.”

The essay well describes what we do. I’m interested to hear what you might think, reader, especially if you work in rhetoric and composition, or are at all curious about this place. Check it out.