A nation gets the political rhetoric it deserves, and that political rhetoric reveals as well as conceals. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, not the negative connotation it has for being just double talk, b.s. or obfuscation. Political talk tries to be strictly scripted but the script is always disrupted by unexpected events and emergent or recombinant memes–“bimbo eruptions” or the fall of Lehman Brothers or “self deport” or “legitimate rape”.

This blog keeps track of the ever-shifting meanings of words, phrases, references and numbers. Especially in politics, no word, number, image, reference or metaphor is innocent; context changes content. Every thing is a weapon in the total war that is contemporary American politics.

I intend to look at “speech acts” in the double sense of speech in itself constituting an action (and thus having consequences as well as an ethos), as well as being a scripted act. Even when political speech seems genuine–in fact, especially when it seems most genuine–it is a calculated choice, all artifice, all the time.

Blog name: Politiscripts
politiscripts.com
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, not the black arts of double talk, b.s. or obfuscation. A nation gets the political rhetoric it deserves, and that ever-shifting political rhetoric reveals as well as conceals. Political talk tries to be strictly scripted, but the script is always disrupted by unexpected events and emergent or recombinant memes–“bimbo eruptions” or the fall of Lehman Brothers, or “self deport”, or “legitimate rape”, or Obamacare.

This blog keeps track of the ever-shifting meanings of words, phrases, references and numbers. Especially in politics, no word, number, image, reference or metaphor is innocent; context changes content. Everything is a weapon in the total word war that is contemporary American politics.

I intend to look at “speech acts” in the double sense of speech in itself constituting an action (and thus having consequences as well as an ethos), as well as being a scripted act. Even when political speech seems genuine–in fact, especially when it seems most genuine–it is a calculated choice, all artifice, all the time. The ends justify the memes and the memes justify the ends.