A while ago, I had lunch with a colleague and we talked about the recent department meeting. Like me, my colleague is a civilian, and like me, my colleague’s politics are progressive, with a strong explicit commitment to social justice that might work against conventional perceptions of the types of academics who teach at military academies. I was feeling embarrassed, having (once again) publicly put my foot in my mouth at the meeting by declaring some strongly felt opinions about the necessary and primary place of revision in writing instruction and the importance of rhetorical sophistication in creating writing assignments that ask students to go beyond reductive and simplistic yes/no up/down good/bad binaries. Not necessarily embarrassed that I’d made the assertions — for those in composition, I think such preferences are mostly self-evident — but embarrassed that I’d managed to seem so “impassioned” and “adamant,” as another colleague described me, and later my boss. Politically speaking, it likely wasn’t the best way for a new professor to position himself in relation to a department that still has some considerable historical misgivings about bringing all this process stuff into the teaching of writing. On the other hand, though, it’s been made clear to me that part of the reason I was hired here was to help contribute to re-orienting the perspective on writing instruction, and so I’m protesting a bit too much: I knew in coming here that I’d be saying things about pedagogy many of my more senior colleagues might not agree with, and I knew as well that my politics would be radically different from the politics of many of my colleagues, and radically different as well from the politics of a majority of my students. No surprise there, right?

I’m not so sure. After the ideological certainties that go along with being a graduate student and teaching assistant at Research 1 schools, and even after my four years as an enlisted soldier, I’m having to learn a radically different teacherly rhetoric with which to engage the cadets in my classes; a rhetoric that’s in many ways far more ideologically attuned to political nuance than what I’ve been used to. After lunch, I met with a cadet in my office, and we talked about the mid-process draft of his most recent essay, where he argued about the relationship between a soldier’s private service ethic and the public perception of why soldiers serve. He invoked David Rozelle, the Captain who had his foot blown off by an anti-tank mine in Iraq and later requested and received a return to a command in Iraq. I asked the cadet if it was possible for people to support such soldiers without supporting the war in Iraq. The cadet was impassioned and adamant: absolutely not. One cannot adequately respect Captain Rozelle without understanding and respecting his beliefs and values.

At the institutions where I taught as a graduate student, I’d have found it easy to dismiss such rhetoric from students as something spoken rather than wholly inhabited; as an idly mouthed rhetorical commonplace rather than a deeply felt credo. Here, though, every single one of my students knows that they incur a five-year service obligation, and that upon graduation their first stop is likely either Iraq or Afghanistan. And as I’ve noted before, they bear that prospect — as they do all things — with complete equanimity. With students whose attitudes and demeanor seem so different from those I’ve encountered elsewhere, then, I’ve had cause to question my own ideology, my own pedagogical practice, my own rhetorical commonplaces and political positions, all in ways that I might not have elsewhere. And yet some of the commonplaces seem so much the same, as well, even as they come from different ideological positions. My lunchtime colleague mentioned his longtime association with certain left-radical coalitions within academia, and the way that they’d closed off communication with him when he came to teach here. As if he were, in a way, a Benedict Arnold to their cause.

I teach at a military academy, and my personal politics are far left, and I see no necessary contradiction there. Certainly, I share the ideals of the peace movement: people should not wage war upon one another. But those are easy ideals to hold. I wonder whether folks in organizations like Rhetoricians for Peace would see someone who works as an educator for the military as a puppet, a stooge, an ignoramus. I wonder, in fact, what they might see as the relationship between peace and the military. Because I think they and my cadets might stand to learn something about commitment and idealism from one another; about rhetorics easy and hard.

The elections are weeks away, and tonight I’m grading papers and continuing to refine a writing assignment that asks students to engage with difficult texts on vexed topics in ways that require some attention to one’s own politics. In coming up with lead-in exercises, I’ve again encountered a Web site I’ve used as part of past class exercises, and I’m delighted to see they’ve fleshed out their materials considerably.

One of the things they now include is a quiz, from which I’ll shamelessly steal the following question:

What prominent American Republican said these two things?

1. “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are. . . a few. . . Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

2. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed; those who are cold and are not clothed.”

I hope you might venture a guess in the comments. If you know, or if you Googled, please play nice and don’t spoil the fun.

Bonus discussion question: What sorts of politically correct feminist tree-hugging left-wing hippie peacenik terrorist-loving Democrats and academics can you imagine mouthing such sentiments?

Examples welcomed.

Imagine you’ve been working with your students on productive strategies for paraphrasing and summarizing. Imagine you’ve been working with them on properly formatting their quotations and lists of Works Cited, as well. Imagine that you offer them a passage from a text and a set of ways of using that passage that are either (1) acceptable, (2) plagiarized, (3) erroneous, or (4) both plagiarized and erroneous. You ask them to work in pairs to come up with evaluations and rationales for those evaluations.

Does the fact that one pair of students uses the scissors, paper, rock method of evaluation to arrive at their decisions indicate to you that this is (1) the last class on a Friday afternoon, (2) the last class on a Friday afternoon, or (3) the last class on a Friday afternoon?

My boss came by and stood in the door and watched while this was happening, and we couldn’t do anything other than laugh. The cadets in question already had the answers, and were clearly making fun of the instructorial panopticism. I don’t know how to adequately describe the situation, aside from saying that my boss is both a PhD scholar and an Infantry branch Lieutenant Colonel, and all eyes in the classroom immediately noted his rank. And as for the cadets in question: well, if you’re going to get in trouble for doing something, and you’ve been spotted doing it, why stop?

There’s something about the authoritarian structure here that promotes a counterhegemonic engagement in (a very few) certain students; an engagement I’ve seldom seen elsewhere. And I’ll confess: I like that engagement.

I’ll be teaching sections of English 101 — “Composition” is the course title — at the United States Military Academy at West Point this fall. The curriculum is a bit regimented, but it’s surprising in the freedom it offers instructors, as well.

Grading standards are highly explicit and non-negotiable: it’s made quite clear exactly what is and is not permissible, and as one might expect, there’s a strong current-traditionalist influence in the standards’ attention to error. Cadets are expected to “develop the capacity to organize facts and ideas in a persuasive, logical argument and demonstrate … their ability to meet appropriate standards of organization, substance, correctness, and style in writing” (Department of English Mission and Policies). So: an argument-focused course, with the familiar updating of three of the five canons (inventio, dispositio, and elocutio become content, structure, and style), and an unsurprising generational split in faculty attitudes towards error and how to work with it.

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Julie Graham, who constitutes one half of the feminist economic geographer author-function known as J. K. Gibson-Graham, gave an excellent talk tonight about her/their new book, A Postcapitalist Politics. And as I struggle/race/work to finish the final chapter of my dissertation, my head’s abuzz with their ideas. Some are familiar from The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), which — by the way — is in print again, in a new and more affordable edition, in case you missed it the first time. But I won’t here try to sort out the old from the new: suffice to say it’s all good, and if you’re interested (and maybe even if you’re not) in alternatives to mainstream discursive constructions of the all-consuming all-commodified wholly market-based economy, they’re well worth your attention.

Here’s why.

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There was a decent episode of The Unit tonight that dealt with SERE training: scary stuff, from all accounts, and training I simultaneously found myself grateful that I never had to do and at the same time very much wished I’d had the opportunity to try and prove myself in. I was a lowly non-elite active-duty soldier and NCO, but I had some opportunities to train with guys from the 1st of the 75th, and they and the 3rd of the 160th SOAR were a visible presence where I was stationed, and my friend Daniel was Special Forces. (OK, so all that makes me sound like even more of a wannabe. Guilty as charged.) Out of all of them, Daniel and the two Rangers who’d done SERE training were the only ones who didn’t have that JSOC swagger; who didn’t have that cock-of-the-walk strut. And it’s funny, because that swagger was so much what I wanted to have: when I was getting near the end of my enlistment and thinking about how much I liked books, how much I liked reading and writing and how appealing being in higher education might be, the one thing that almost made me re-up was when the reenlistment NCO told me, “Sergeant Ed, I can get you a Special Forces contract.” But I went for the books instead, and now — years later — I’m happy to be headed to West Point as a civilian professor. (With the occasional second-guessing of what I might’ve done.)

Though the show never uses the word, The Unit is of course about Delta. The show’s a David Mamet project, and his writing made the first episode’s dialogue particularly snappy and engaging, but in the succeeding episodes, the writers and producers have clearly done their research. With the focus split between conflict abroad and wives waiting at home, the show’s cultural and political ideologies are very much designed to appeal to a conservative demographic — but I’d argue, as a political liberal, that that’s not much of a reason not to watch it. The show focuses on the tactical rather than the strategic perspective, and in fact often uses the tactical perspective to question the strategic perspective, as many soldiers do. The proliferation of supportive wives is overdone and reinforces unfortunate gender stereotypes, and in some ways moves the representation of post housing a little bit closer to Stepford with each episode — divorced JSOC soldiers are plentiful, for obvious reasons, so why aren’t they represented on the show? — but also makes a necessary statement about all the difficulties that military spouses manage to endure.

And then there’s the flip side to the way that the popular media tries to thrill you with representations of covert war: “The Desert One Debacle.” The story is yet more impressive reporting from Mark Bowden, who wrote Black Hawk Down (forget the movie: if you want to know what really went on, read the book, and even the book is considerably sanitized). Read it all the way through, and you’ll see how stuff never works the way it’s supposed to in the military. People simply don’t learn that things never go the way you expect them to go. Nobody who’d been through SERE training ever talked about it much. They wanted those who hadn’t done it to not know, to not anticipate. And dive training? The first thing they do, we were told, is drown you. You’re held under water, at the bottom of a pool, until you take a breath, two breaths, more, and fill your lungs with water. They do it to get you over your fear of drowning, and then they rescuscitate you.

So I wonder, as I move from a deeply liberal civilian institution to a rather more conservative military institution of higher education: how might one ask a student who’s been drowned or gone through SERE to write the personal essay?

Ted Kennedy was on Jon Stewart tonight, and he needs to fire every member of his idiot staff.

Republicans had a field day with John Kerry’s relationship to privilege in the last presidential election, and yet Kennedy showed up with a fussy three-point folded pocket square and did everything he could to wipe his cufflinks across viewers’ faces. And the worst part was the heavy gold linked bracelet that Kennedy seemed to want to jiggle in front of the cameras at every opportunity.

Yeah, Ted, you’re a fat cat. Your family is extraordinarily wealthy, and you benefit more than anyone else from those tax cuts for the rich. And tonight, you displayed your privilege–in those cufflinks, in that fussy pocket square, in that heavy and ostentatious gold link bracelet–in a way that reveals the genuinely plutocratic nature of the United States Senate.

I’m a Massachusetts liberal, and I have to say to Senator Kennedy: thank you for losing my Democratic vote. Partly because of what you’re saying, yes, but more because of how you’re saying it: you’re one of the most important Democrats in the Senate, and yet you and your staff are sufficiently stupid to think it’s a good idea to prominently display all the emblems of economic privilege that you possess.

I’m Ted Kennedy. Vote for me because I’m rich.

Everybody already knows how good Michaél Bérubé’s blog is, which is why I don’t put it in my blogroll: doing so would be like linking to Google and saying, “Check out this cool search engine!” But I gotta say, his extended piece last week on academic freedom merits the linkage anyway. If you haven’t seen it, check it out.

Last week, Terry Eagleton gave our English department’s annual Troy Lecture on the Humanities and Public Life. It was a great talk, and I was one of the grad students who got invited to come along to the faculty dinner with Eagleton afterwards, which was excellent as well, though I’ll cop to being star-struck and tongue-tied. But Eagleton was charming and funny and brilliant and intensely charismatic, and I’m glad to have gone to both the talk and the dinner, especially since my dissertation work owes so much to the theoretical inheritance — via Eagleton and others — of his mentor, Raymond Williams.

His lecture focused on two terms: terror and tragedy. Terror, of course, in its modern rhetorical deployment as “terrorism,” and tragedy in its literary sense. The term “modern” is essential, according to Eagleton, because terror (as a political idea and a philosophical concept) and modernity are “twinned at birth”: the word “terrorist” was first used by Edmund Burke in reference to the French Revolution, the founding of the first modern bourgeois state. But — of course — in that case, terror was the Jacobin state. As Eagleton put it, “Terror has an impeccable bourgeois pedigree.” He pointed out, as well, that our contemporary rhetorical references to “9/11″ have their own predecessor in the September 11 death of Salvador Allende in the coup d’etat that installed General Pinochet and Milton Friedman’s Los Chicago Boys 28 years earlier. (Yes, again with the economics — but with Eagleton, the first and second Paris Communes, Friedman, and Chile, how could it not be?)

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Maria Farrell’s recent piece concerning what the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina shows about the American economy and class structure is well worth a read, as are a few of the subsequent comments.