Texas Speech Communication Journal

I begin, embarrassingly, with a cliché: EVERYTHING CHANGED AFTER 9-11! This is, of course, an eye roll-inducing phrase, for it was and remains ubiquitous following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Nine-eleven represented “the end of irony” (Hirschorn, 2011), the production of the “melancholic citizen-subject” (Biesecker, 2007), and, of course, the beginning of the so-called War on Terror. For this brief essay, I refer to the changes that occurred in my own sense of politics and vocation as a 21-year-old living in central Illinois. The fall of 2001 marked the beginning of my senior year at Illinois State University and, therefore, my final year on its speech team. I entered my final year of competition with a sense that I was experiencing the dreaded “senior slump.” I was not sure what I had left to say in the context of the activity and was ambivalent about shouldering the burdens of leadership typical of successful team members during their senior year. However, the events of 9-11 prompted a reappraisal of my relationship to forensics and helped lay a foundation for my current roles as a communication scholar, educator, and community activist. Drawing on my experiences as a speech competitor at the dawn of the War on Terror, I argue in this essay that forensics, at its best, provides an outlet for the production and dissemination of radically contextual knowledge and, at least in my case, the rhetorical and intellectual enactment of radical politics. One week before the towers collapsed, I completed what I believed to be the final draft of my Communication Analysis (CA). The American Forensics Association describes CA as “An original speech … designed to offer an explanation and/or evaluation of a communication event” (“Event Descriptions,” n.d.). The standard CA applies a “model,” typically drawn from a single article in a communication journal, to an “artifact,” or the “communication event” under consideration. It is, in short, a ten-minute rhetorical criticism. While the competitive CA does not possess anywhere near the rigor of a scholarly article or monograph, I remain indebted to the event for, more than any other, providing me with an early sense of how one can apply theory to concrete communicative phenomena (i.e. what I now do for a living). For my senior year CA, I chose to analyze an article published by the iconoclast author Gore Vidal in the September 2001 issue of Vanity Fair. The piece, entitled “The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh,” made several, to put it mildly, provocative claims about the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The Oklahoma City Bombing was, up to that point, the most notorious terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Vidal’s (2001) article suggested that there was a federal conspiracy behind the bombing intended to erode civil liberties. Furthermore, based largely on his mail correspondence with the condemned bomber, he characterized McVeigh as an individual whose actions, no matter how forcefully we may condemn them, were grounded in legitimate grievances about the excesses of state control.

Vidal was clearly playing with fire, and I was intrigued. Six years after the bombing and several months after McVeigh’s execution, the events in Oklahoma City remained emotionally charged for U.S. citizens. Here was one of our nation’s most controversial men of letters rewriting the sacred narrative of a right-wing sociopath who savagely murdered innocent men, women, and children. Such a provocation struck me as interesting and, maybe more importantly at the time, competitively promising. With some guidance, I discovered an article by Phaedra Pezzullo (2001) describing “critical interruptions” performed by environmental justice activists that provided me with a model for systematically analyzing Vidal’s own interruption of this traumatic public memory of terrorist violence. After several drafts, I concluded the speech was ready for the season’s first tournament.

I intended to sleep in on September 11, 2001, but my roommate woke me with news of the apocalypse unfolding in New York and Washington. We sat and watched the television stunned by a scene that resembled so many high-budget action movies (see Baudrillard, 2003). As bodies fell from windows, towers collapsed, and the suspicion that Al-Qaeda orchestrated the attacks became more certain, I was struck by the concretization of so much of my armchair activism over the previous years. In addition to focusing my competitive energies on events, like CA, which required familiarity with theory and current events, I had a longstanding fascination with radical politics. I spent much of high school listening to punk bands and devouring work by the likes of Noam Chomsky and other leftists. I had even given some competitive extemporaneous speeches arguing that the likelihood of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil was directly correlated to our nation’s violent imperial legacies in the Middle East and other parts of the world (see Johnson, 2000). As my thoughts gathered and coalesced with the guttural horror I was feeling, I realized that such analysis was manifesting before my eyes. Yes, what was unfolding in Manhattan and Washington at that very moment was horrific and unforgivable, but I quickly concluded that these attacks occurred largely in response to my own nation’s many sins.

I eventually found my way to the speech team room on campus, convinced it was the only space where I could engage in a rational discussion about events that I, and everybody else, already knew would fundamentally change the trajectory of U.S. politics and culture. Subsequent experiences in classrooms, at work, and consuming national media confirmed my strong suspicion at the time that a leftist analysis of this tragedy was not welcome in polite discussion. These were, after all, times that prompted one journalist to call for “a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury” (Morrow, 2001). People did not want to hear about empire, blowback, or any other commentary that might be, incorrectly, interpreted as claiming we deserved this.

The team room, on balance, provided the enclave I sought. I joined several likeminded teammates in a conversation that oscillated between grief, rage, and analysis. Indeed, all three merged in our discussions, for none of us doubted that what occurred was tragic, but we directed much of our anger toward decades of U.S. foreign policy for providing men like Osama bin Laden with the evidence they required to mobilize so much anger in our direction. An hour or so passed before one of my coaches, with whom I worked most closely on my CA, entered the room in a daze. He promptly looked at me and said, “You’re going to have to rewrite your CA.” He then left to go home and watch the news. Admittedly, next week’s tournament was not foremost on my mind at that moment, but I immediately knew that he was right. My speech had suddenly become a living, contextualized thing that, if I wanted my last year in this activity to mean something, needed to speak to this difficult moment. I was, after all, at that moment, thinking through precisely the challenges Vidal’s incendiary essay reified. How does one say the unsayable in these charged times? How does one critically interrupt the emerging prevailing narrative around 9-11?

I promptly revised my speech and, in the process, my relationship to forensics. I spent the year using my CA to call for rhetorical strategies that created space for the kinds of analysis I thought we needed after 9-11, but, because of the tendency of a national tragedy to foreclose critical discussion, was often elusive. I also reexamined my relationship to my other competitive events and began selecting topics that reflected my emerging belief that reading Chomsky was not enough; I wanted and needed to say things, even if others did not want to hear them. I say this not to indulge in any heroic pretensions, but to illustrate the ways forensics became a new kind of gift in my life. The activity initially provided voice and friendship for an awkward, queer kid from the Chicago suburbs. Now it offered what Rosa Eberly (2000) described as a protopublic sphere, or a space where I could engage in the kinds of deliberation and rhetorical invention that were unavailable elsewhere. While I do not want to overstate the activist character of forensics, for such work must also occur outside the speech tournament, this final year of competition became a training ground for the kind of work I continually seek to do today. ¹

It was at this time that I also made the decision to apply to graduate programs and continue exploring the fundamental question of how and why difficult, often violent, topics resisted radical intervention. I was not through thinking about these issues, and graduate school struck me as an intuitive space for doing so. After discovering the work of my future dissertation advisor regarding therapeutic rhetoric, or the use of emotional discourses to privatize social issues, I drafted a master’s thesis attending to the ways victim rights rhetoric emphasized the suffering of victims’ families at the expense of deliberation regarding the myriad inequities of capital punishment (Cloud, 1998; Cloud, 2003; McCann, 2007). Upon completing my master’s degree at Illinois State University, I entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Texas, where I continued exploring the rhetorical character of crime in public culture and helped coach the speech team. I also spent my four years in Austin organizing with the local death penalty abolitionist community. Working with other activists, as well as the families of condemned individuals, concretized my sensitivity to the challenges of making complex arguments about social inequality amid prevailing discourses that privileged the visceral, and quite real, pain and anger of murder victims’ families and their communities.

Today I continue to work in the academy and, to the extent that I am able, engage in activist work. I continue to be interested in the ways discourses of crime and violence circulate in public culture, particularly in their racialized and gendered iterations. While I am no longer affiliated with a forensics program, I continue to believe it is an activity with immense value. For me, the rewards of forensics did not begin or end with my engagements of the work of a legendary provocateur amid the beginnings of a seemingly endless war whose legacies are mass casualties, torture, rampant Islamophobia, and the horrifying excesses of state secrecy and surveillance. However, the road that led to my current juncture, in many respects, began that surreal Tuesday afternoon in the speech team room. It inspired at least two insights that continue to inform my work on the page, in the classroom, and in various communities.

First, the best work, or at least the work worth doing, is radically contextual. Nothing occurs in a vacuum, and one must allow history’s various conjunctures to guide, no matter how unpredictably, the processes of inquiry and invention. To wax theoretical about the musings of Gore Vidal regarding terrorism in 2001 without accounting for an abruptly changing world would have been an ethical, intellectual, and, in all likelihood, competitive failure. Similarly, writing and teaching about crime and public culture without constantly responding to the rapidly changing national conversation on such matters would yield utterly useless work. In the best traditions of cultural studies, and before I knew what cultural studies was, forensics encouraged me never to assume I knew in advance where a project would take me (e.g. Grossberg, 2010).

Second, the most meaningful and valuable work can, or at least should, scare the hell out of you. The months following 9-11 were often lonely outside the context of forensics. Central Illinois was and remains a culturally and politically conservative region, and the national mood following the attacks was similarly so. I even recall moments early in the speech season when a knot formed in my stomach before delivering my CA out of fear of retaliation. Nonetheless, the memories of this year in my forensics career remain among the most vivid. The activity, largely due to my mentors, teammates, and peers at other colleges and universities, provided a venue for saying what I feared was unsayable and going down roads that, it seemed, would have been closed to me in any other context. In my current position as a rhetorical scholar and educator, the character of a difficult question or conversation has changed, but, in my best moments, remains a central component of what I do. As someone who identifies strongly with critical and cultural studies, I am fundamentally interested in questions of power and agency. Texts and Discourses that illuminate the nature of domination and resistance in public life are the ones that attract me. However, I must often remind myself to take detours that lead in uncertain directions. The impulse to dismantle potentially harmful discourses was not the real payoff of engaging Vidal’s provocations through the contextual lens of 9-11. Rather, it was appreciating the necessity of asking uncomfortable questions. For example, it is deceptively easy to identify a flagrantly racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise noxious text and draw on a few theories to validate my first impressions. Similarly, there is little intellectual risk involved in using the critical essay to celebrate the brave efforts of one’s favored activist organizations. I do not mean to suggest that members of the academy should not be in the business of identifying oppression when it presents itself in public discourse or illuminating previously neglected voices, but one can and should do so in ways that invite ambivalence rather than certainty. It is, after all, worth asking what made the words of one of history’s great villains so enticing (Burke, 1957) or asking readers to consider how seemingly progressive discourses can be complicit in the marginalization of the very communities they presume to defend (Chávez, 2013). These are not always comfortable lines of inquiry but, I am increasingly convinced, have the most to teach us. Thus, it was the space forensics provided me to head down uncertain paths that prepared me for what I do today.

Lest I wax too nostalgic about the opportunities forensics provided concerning the risks and rewards of radical inquiry and practice, I should make clear what may not be obvious to the reader: I am a white cisgender man. During four years of competition, no one accused me of exploiting my race or sexuality in the name of competitive success (e.g. Billings, 2000).² In my current capacity as a faculty member at a research university and member of several disciplinary organizations, I have been able to make a career out of writing about and commenting on matters of controversy, particularly the racialized politics of crime, without being dismissed or targeted because of my race (e.g. Locher & Ropers-Huilman, 2015). While forensics competition and academic inquiry have typically allowed me to engage in provocative and radical work, others experience these worlds in very different ways. Thus, in addition to adopting a radically contextual orientation toward forensics and scholarship, those of us who occupy either or both of these worlds should do so with an investment in making our most idealized visions of what we do available to and subject to critical intervention from, all who seek to call these places home.

¹ To be clear, while I do not believe a persuasive speech about a particular form of injustice occurring in the U.S. or elsewhere is an adequate substitute for community engagement confronting such issues, I wholeheartedly believe participants in forensics, particularly those from historically marginalized communities, can and do play activist roles in efforts to make the activity itself more just (e.g. Gamboa, 2014).

² I am bisexual, but never chose LGBTQ-related speech topics or performed queer literature.

References

Baudrillard, J. (2003). The spirit of terrorism and other essays. London, UK: Verso.

Biesecker, B. (2007). No time for mourning: The rhetorical production of the melancholic citizen-subject in the War on Terror. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 40 (1), 147-169. doi: 10.1353/par.2007.0009

Billings, A. (2000). Increasing diversity in the 21st century: Minority participation in competitive individual events. The Forensic of Pi Kappa Delta, 85, 1-9.

Burke, K. (1957). The rhetoric of Hitler’s “battle.” In The philosophy of literary form: Studies in symbolic action (pp. 164-189). New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Chávez, K.R. (2013). Queer migration politics: Activist rhetoric and coalitional possibilities. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Cloud, D.L. (1998). Control and consolation in American culture and politics: Rhetorics of therapy. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Cloud, D.L. (2003). Therapy, silence, and war: Consolation and the end of deliberation in the “affected” public. Poroi, 2 (1). Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.13008/2151- 2957.1060. doi: 10.13008/2151-2957.1060

Eberly, R.A. (2000). Citizen critics: Literary public spheres. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Event descriptions. (n.d.). National Individual Events Tournament. Retrieved from https://sites.google.com/site/afanietnew2/products-services/event-descriptions

Gamboa, Eddie. (2014, February 15). Welcome to Occupy 4n6. Occupy 4n6. Retrieved from https://occupy4n6.com/welcome-to-occupy4n6/

Grossberg, L. (2010). Cultural studies in the future tense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hirschorn, M. (2011, August 27). Irony, the end of. New York. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/irony/

Johnson, C. (2001). Blowback: The costs and consequences of American empire. London, UK: Macmillan.

Locher, H., & Ropers-Huilman, R. (2015). Wearing you down: The influence of racial battle fatigue on academic freedom for faculty of color. In K. Fasching-Varner, K.A. Albert, R.W. Mitchell, & C. Allen (Eds.), Racial battle fatigue in higher education: Exposing the myth of post-racial America (pp. 103-114). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

McCann, B.J. (2007). Therapeutic and material <victim>hood: Ideology and the struggle for meaning in the Illinois death penalty controversy. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 4 (4), 382-401. doi: 10.1080/14791420701632931

Morrow, L. (2001, September 14). The case for rage and retribution. Time. Retrieved from http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1000762,00.html

Pezzullo, P.C. (2001). Performing critical interruptions: Stories, rhetorical invention, and the environmental justice movement. Western Journal of Communication, 65 (1), 1-25. doi: 10.1080/10570310109374689

Vidal, G. (2001, August 31). The meaning of Timothy McVeigh. Vanity Fair. Retrieved from http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2001/09/mcveigh200

References

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