Motherjane insane biography of barack obama
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Speech Acts
Discussed in this essay: The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. 304 pages.
IN “CONTEST OF WORDS,” an essay in the October 2012 issue of Harper’s, Ben Lerner reflected on his past as a high school policy debate champion. “If you could walk the halls like an anthropologist or a ghost and peer into the rooms mid-round,” he writes, you would witness “what is nominally an exchange of ideas [reduced] to an athletic display of unreason.” This “athletic” exercise of speech against an opponent took the form of what debaters called “the spread”—a rhetorical practice in which a competitor speaks rapidly, cramming as much information and as many angles of argument as possible into the allotted time. To Lerner, these insane speeches, during which he “experienced occasional accesses of power,” resembled certain experimental poems, but they also reflected the corporate lingo of “fine print” and the side effects listed at the end of pharmaceutical commercials; all of these are “types of disclosure,” he writes, “designed to conceal” through sheer velocity. Lerner contrasts this everyday “spread” in American life with “the incredibly slow speech of politicians, of the new right in particular”—this “fetishized stupidity” of the Tea Party that m
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Conversely, presidents who appear to mistreat their canine companions go straight to the doghouse. Lyndon B. Johnson loved his dogs—and even “sang” duets with Yuki, a stray that LBJ’s daughter Luci found abandoned at a gas station in Texas. But the hounds were let loose when Life magazine ran a story on LBJ discussing his relationship with his beagles, Him and Her. One photograph showed the president lifting Him up by his ears. Johnson insisted, “I’ve been pulling Him’s ears since he was a pup, and he seemed to like it.” But howls of protest erupted from pet fanciers across the country. Coincidentally or not, LBJ declined to run for reelection in 1968.
Decades later, in 2012, Mitt Romney’s campaign against President Barack Obama went to the dogs. Was it because the patrician GOP candidate was secretly recorded saying that 47% of Obama’s voters were “dependent upon government”? Or because years earlier, during a 12-hour road trip from Boston to Ontario, Romney had put Seamus, his Irish setter, in a dog carrier that he’d strapped on top of the family station wagon? According to The New York Times, one wag suggested on Fox News that to be more likable, Romney “should go out onstage with the dog that he had on the roof of the car and have the dog endorse him right there
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