A Star Spangled Rhetoric

You have heard it a million times before.  Before every Super Bowl game and at every graduation the national anthem is sung.   Every rendition is different and some are better than others; the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Have you ever stopped to think about why you enjoy certain renditions more so than others?  If you analyze different celebrity performances of the star spangled banner, you will see that rhetoric and the devices thereof play a vital role in your overall impression of each version.  Transmission of affect, the preceding situation, and delivery are three components of a successful presentation of the national anthem.

            Let’s begin with the ugly.  On July 25, 1990, Rosanne Barr, Emmy Award winning comedian and actress, sang the star spangled banner at the commencement of the nationally aired baseball game between the San Diego Padres and the Cincinnati Reds at the Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego California.  Baseball officials encouraged the comedian to “bring humor to the song,” with no expectations of a showcase of musical expertise.  Rosanne did exactly what the officials asked, not knowing that her “humor” was sure to back fire.  Upon the pitcher’s mound, she began to screech and scream the words of the national anthem as loudly as she possibly could.  Midway through the off-key first stanza, she chokes back laughter at her obvious lack of skill.  She finishes her performance by throwing open her arms, harking a loogie, spitting it on the ground, and grabbing her crotch before exiting the field with a huge smile on her face.  That smile was soon turned upside down as a result of the overwhelming backlash weighing down upon Rosanne.

            The controversy that spurred from this incident is a perfect example of the transmission of affect as discussed by Teresa Brennan in her book, The Transmission of Affect.  Brennan believed:

Affects can be compounded by interactive dynamics that some groups will carry more affective loads than others will.  Similarly, codes of restraint where the affects are concerned also vary, with emotional displays being looked upon favorably in some contexts while they are discouraged in others. (Brennan 51)

This belief shows that people’s emotions change when they enter a group and combine with others to form a new “group mind” or collective state of emotion.  People might have individually found humor in Rosanne’s performance, like when I burst into laughter every time I watch a recording of this performance, but because the mix of emotions in the stadium that day created a sense of offense no one there laughed.  Instead, people felt like Rosanne was out of line and disrespecting America.  Many felt that crotch grabbing and spitting were inappropriate actions for a female to enact, especially in public.  One by one, they began to boo.  Immediately an emotional contagion took place.  People saw other people looking around in disgust and heard other people booing which resulted in them doing the same (sight and hearing as the principle mechanisms in the communication of affect 56).  Brennan describes this domino effect within a crowd saying, “The greater the number of people in whom the same affect can be simultaneously observed, the stronger does this automatic compulsion grow,” which explains the spread of disgust throughout the crowd and individuals watching the game on television (56).  National Disapproval was ultimately solidified when President George H. W. Bush labeled her rendition as “disgraceful”.

            Next, we’ll discuss the bad.  On September 11, 2001 the United States of America faced one of the biggest tragedies in our nation’s history.  A group of al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes.  Two were crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City killing 2,606 victims along with the plane passengers.  One was crashed into the Pentagon killing 125 people plus the plane passengers.  The fourth plane was crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania killing only its passengers.  The country was in massive mourning and injected with fear, but life went on.  A few months later, officials postponed the Super Bowl in fear that terrorist may sabotage this nationally aired event.  A week later, Mariah Carey was selected by NFL officials to sing the national anthem on game day with high hopes for the high caliber of her performance.

            February 3, 2002, Mariah Carey sang her rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at Super Bowl XXXVI at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans for the game between the New England Patriots and the St. Louis Rams.  In her strapless blue evening gown, she begins the song.  Immediately, her prima donna mannerisms cascade over the lyrics.  Spectators see one hand on the microphone with the other in a flat hand, spread fingers, 5 position waving back and forth as she periodically closes her eyes to complete one of her bountiful vocal runs.  A little high octave, then she’s done.

`           The performance wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t awe inspiring either.  People were expecting a performance that would wow the masses and comfort those in grief, but they got just a typical recital of the national anthem.  The moderate feelings towards this performance can be attributed to the choppiness of her delivery.  Brian Massumi said:

Language belongs to entirely different orders depending on which redundancy it enacts, or it always enacts both more or less completely: two languages, two dimensions of every expression, one superlinear, the other linear.  Every event takes place on both levels. (Edbauer 4)

He termed these two halves expectation and suspense.  Jenny Edbauer claims that these two halves also apply to the body and not just language.  She says:

A cultural theory of affect is a theory of the body.  The affective body is an event; it is implicated in the doubleness of the event.  Whereas many readings of the body begin in qualification and ideological realms- - in meaning- -we must not neglect the body’s total event.  That is, we must not neglect both halves of the body: qualification and intensity (5).

This means Moriah’s body language and movements could have taken away from the impact of her performance because the jerkiness of her waving hand and disconnect from her closed eyes disrupt what the audience was expecting.  They were expecting a smooth inspirational performance based on our country and the terrors of  9/11.  She gave them a performance showcasing her vocal range with the emphasis on her instead of the country.  This can be paralleled to the example of President Reagan’s speech and how his jerkiness hindered spectators from following his speech (8).  Moriah’s body didn’t relate to her audience in a positive way, so some viewers failed to feel any emotion from her performance.

            Finally, we consider the good.  In December 1990 when Whitney Houston was determined to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl, she knew that she wanted to add a jazz and soul feel to the song.  Whitney decided to take the song out of its standard waltz tempo, three quarters time, and add an extra beat per measure.  Many NFL officials, knowing that the Super Bowl would be aired worldwide for the first time in countries other than America and the UK, warned her that this approach was too flamboyant for wartime and feared viewers thinking her rendition was sacrilegious.  However on January 27, 1991, Whitney Houston stood center field before 73, 813 fans, 115 million viewers in the United States, and 750 million viewers across the world to perform her rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.  At Super Bowl XXV between the New York Giants and the Buffalo Bills, she wowed the masses.  One week later, she released a vocal recording of the performance and it reached number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 list making her the first artist in history to sell their rendition of the national anthem as a hit single.  The visual recording of her NFL performance was used as the music video for this single.  Years later, Whitney's single continued to move audiences.  After the September 11^th attacks, Arista Records rereleased the single.  This time it reached number 6 on the Top 100 Chart, became certified platinum, and peaked number 5 on the Canadians Single Chart.  Now the big question is, “What made Whitney’s version so widely acclaimed?”

            First and foremost, the rhetoric of this performance was in response to a rhetorical situation.  Lloyd Bitzer defines the rhetoric as,

Rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action.  The rhetor alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes a mediator of change.  In this sense rhetoric is always persuasive. (Bitzer 4)

The discourse he mentions comes into existence because of some specific condition or situation which invites utterance; the rhetorical situation.  In this case, the situation is the start of the Gulf War.  The country was torn on the issue of entering the war.  Soldiers were being deported.  A cloud of uncertainty and fear hung over America.  Whitney, in the position of rhetor, utilized her performance to responded to this sense of uncertainty by reminding Americans of American pride and offering a message of unity.  Her message was the rhetoric that brought about a change by giving viewers new hope and opened a discourse about the war that had been previously dreaded.

            The other major component of success for Whitney’s performance was the transmission of affect for those present and those watching on TV.  For those present at the stadium, the sea of American flags in the stands that almost every individual present carried, the posters and signs people had made reading “God Bless America,” the crying, and the empowering gestures of Whitney as she sang created a patriotic atmosphere that itself was transmitted into the individuals there.  The fans were unified, comforted, and proud to be Americans. 

            For the fans watching via television the affect worked in a similar way.  Houston takes the field.  She wears a white hair band and white tracksuit with a red and blue print, an athletic uniform that refers to the national tricolor red, white, and blue. The announcer asks the audience to join in the honoring of "America" and "especially the brave men and women serving our nation in the Persian Gulf and throughout the world." While the athletes are notably absent on the field, the military personnel, dressed in various uniforms to signify the solidarity among different army units, display the flags of the different American states. Two male members of the military are singled out through the use of close-ups: an African-American officer and a white officer. The close-up of the African-American officer raising his hand in salute overlaps with the close-up of the audience. And the close-up of Houston dissolves into the close-up of the white officer, and back again. For a second, both Houston and the white officer are captured within the same frame. The American flag is omnipresent in all shots, either explicitly in the form of an actual American flag, or implicitly through the use of its colors red, white, and blue. In addition to the waving American flags, best visible when shot from a distance, on several occasions, the presence of the flag is emphasized through the use of close-ups in connection to the words Whitney Houston sings. When she sings, "...see, by the dawn's early light," a close-up of an American flag dissolves in and out of the close-up of Houston. Houston does not leave the frame, but for a second, the image of American flag is transparently placed over her image. At the point when Houston sings "through the night that our flag was still there," the camera cuts to a close-up of the American flag waving at the top of the stadium. Throughout the performance, there are medium shots and close-ups of the audience waving small American flags. With Houston throwing her arms into the air, as if she’s in victory and endowed with strength, the scene is made complete with four F-16 fighting jets from the 56th Tactical Training Will at MacDill Air Force Base flying over as the performance's grand finale.  The imagery and special affects helps to constitue an image of a united America which caused widespread praise of this performance.

            In conclusion, rhetoric plays a vital role with how individuals perceive different performances.  When performing the national anthem it is beneficial to do so in response to some situation or tragedy, keep in mind the different ideals among your audience, and deliver the song in a manner appropriate for the occasion.  Whitney Houston maintained all three of these components in her rendition of the national anthem which has lead her to be considered the best performer of the national anthem in America's history. 

Work Cited

Brennan, Teresa.  The Transmission of Affect.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.  Print

 Edbauer, J. (2004). Executive overspill: Affective bodies, intensity, and Bush-in-relation. The University of Texas at Austin. 

Bitzer on the Rhetorical Situation

Lloyd Bitzer defines rhetoric and explains what exactly the rhetorical situation consists of in his article, The Rhetorical Situation.

He says that rhetoric is a context of persons, events, objects, and relations with an exigence which strongly invites an utterance.  Rhetoric exists to produce an action or change in the world in response to the exigence. Or in other words, the speaker’s intentions and audience expectations are functions of the situation that has “invited” the rhetor’s response.

This means to me that rhetoric is everywhere in everything because there is a situation in everything everywhere that could gather a response.  For example, if you hear your stomach growling then the situation is that you are hungry.  As a result, you the rhetor might try to convince you the audience to get out of bed in order to make yourself something to eat.  One of the many constraints of this situation may be that you don’t have any food in the Frigidaire to cook.  Thus you have a rhetorical situation within your own self.

I think that Bitzer breaks rhetoric down to a level that is easy for everyone to grasp and understand.  

Affective Economies

          Sara Amed suggests a new way of approaching emotions.  She says:

Rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they work, in concrete particular ways, to mediate the relationships between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective (119),

in order to introduce her idea of the affective economy that uses emotions to construct the boundaries and the world.

            This idea is very interesting and true in the American society today.  If you were to talk a walk into a high school cafeteria during lunch time on a regular day, you’ll find wide scale segregation of the students.  Most of the black kids will be at a table with other black kids; the same for Whites and Hispanics.  This is so because of the affective economies at work.

The failure of emotions to be located in a body, object, or figure allows the emotions to reproduce or generate the effects that they do (124).

The black kids at the same table share a type of love.  This love may come from sharing in the same experiences, being raised in households with similar beliefs, and the same ancestry.  Out of the love that they share, a degree of hate is generated towards students in other ethnic groups.  The emotions at play in the high school basically dictate who hangs out with who, thus creating the boundaries of this affective economy.

            Though I agree with Amed, I think that emotions are generated from the individual from some extent.  For example, black slaves in America might have held a lot of contempt towards their masters, but when slavery ended the effects prevailed because someone voiced that contempt.  Whoever spoke out first did so based off of their emotions.  That idea of pain and hurt spread throughout the black community and has permeated down through the generations.  Now social boundaries are established, but that would not have been so if these emotions would have never pushed an individual to speak out.

Revision of Written Appeal

Early Monday morning April 16, 2007 the day begins.  A day that started the same as every other but ended in infamy.  Around 7:15 a.m. Emily J. Hilscher is murdered in her dorm room.  7:19 a.m. Ryan C. Clark suffers a similar fate.  Approximately 2 hours later around 9:40 a.m., Professor G. V. Loganathan and 9 of his students are killed with two others severely wounded; room 206.  Across the hall in room 207, German professor Christopher James Bishop along with four of his students die next.  Six other students left injured.  Down the hall, rooms 211 and 204 frantically scramble to barricade the doors.  Professor Librescu and one valiant student are shot to death as the rest of room 204 escapes out the window.  Instructor Nowak and Henry Lee die while holding closed the doors of 211.  Reload.  Back to 207 and 206.  Then down to 205.  Around 9:51 a.m. the last shot sounds as the shooter bites his own bullet.  2 buildings, 2 hours, 2 guns, and one shooter leaves 33 dead and 25 injured; the Virginia Tech Massacre.

On February 7, 2011, republican representative Van Taylor filed House Bill 1167 in an effort to legalize the carrying of concealed handguns on college campuses.  In order to obtain a license to carry a gun on these campuses one must be at least 21 years old, undergo an extensive state and federal criminal records check, complete handgun safety education, and qualify using a handgun on a range.  Taylor says, “They (students) deserve the right of self defense off and on campus.”  The longtime second amendment (the right to keep and bear arms) supporter is backed by the National Rifle Association.  “Colleges and universities are not crime free zones,” Tara Mica, the NRA’s state legislative liaison told The New American reporter.  Her solution to the crime epidemic faced by higher education campuses in Texas is to give everyone a gun so that students and faculty will be able to protect themselves and keep college campuses safe.  However, Ms. Mica and Mr. Taylor seem to have overlooked a couple of issues.

The first qualification to conceal a firearm on college campuses according to the purposed bill is to be twenty-one years of age.   Twenty-one as in twenty-one bottles of beer on the wall?  Twenty-one bottles of beer?  Ok.  I see.  Society should allow 21 year old boys and girls to walk around with pistols strapped to their waists and a bottle of everclear in hand.  Right, because that’s the smart thing to do.  When actually more than half of the students at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas’ biggest college campus, are at least 21 years old and they drink like they’re half whale.  So people should be okay with granting early stage drunkards a license to kill as if they possess a clear mind to judge the proper moment to use a gun.  Who’s to say the student who just turned 21 and started their birthday off with that early morning vodka won’t shoot someone else?  Who’s to say the 21 year old frat boy with the hangover from the night before
won’t is capable of handling a firearm?  Ha! I guess 21 is the perfect age to allow students to start carrying guns. 

Another prerequisite for getting a concealed handgun license is to undergo an extensive federal and state criminal records check.  This is because only people with previous criminal backgrounds are apt to shoot on college campuses.  Just like the shooters at…. Oh that’s right; the previous gunmen on college campuses didn’t have records of criminal activity.  The recent gunman on UT’s campus, and many others, are regular students with mental illnesses or a grudge on their shoulders.  But what the heck, keeping guns from ex-convicts should make anybody feel safe.

You can’t forget to make sure that these 21 year old saints are well educated in handgun safety.  By all means!  There’s absolutely no possibility that authorities could end up teaching potential gunmen how to make sure they injure everyone else, but keep themselves safe.  None.  Also, no one will have to worry about that rare occasion when someone forgets to put the safety on the gun and accidentally shoots themselves or someone else.  This is because when people are educated about something, they practice it.  That’s why people continue to smoke cancer sticks and ride in their cars with no seatbelts.

The last thing that we as a society must make sure we teach our gun holders, our “defenders,” is how to use these guns at a gun range.  We must train a new generation of skilled marksmen who walk among us.  Keeping in mind, we trust our angelic marksmen to use their skills for good and never turn shoulder to our cause.  Though, trust gets lost all the time.  Then what?

History shows us what guns on school campuses can do.  Remember Columbine and Virginia Tech?  Do you remember the pain and the loss?  Parents with no child.  Children but no parent.  Can you hear the guns firing?  Can you see the bullets whizzing through the air?  Can you hear the deathly screams and silent falls to death?  Can you feel the fear?  Do you see the flowing tears and blood stained classrooms?  Do you sense the panic?  Can you hear the silence?

Rewind.  Guns fire.  Bullets fly.  Screams pierce the air.  Now in the midst of the hysteria and confusion people start pulling out guns.  You don’t know who’s who and what’s what.  Is she aiming at me?  Can you steer your nerves?  Who do you shoot?  Who’s the bad guy?

Do you shrink to the floor and cower under your desk wishing, hoping, praying this is all over?  Or do you reach for your gun?  Close your eyes.  Pow!  And again.  And again.  And again until this is all over.  Is that what you want?  More than anything, you just want this to be over.  Do you dare open your eyes?

Final Project Proposal! :)

1)     I found Whitney Houston’s rendition of the National Anthem that was sung at SuperBowl XXV.  It has gone down in the pages of history for being particularly moving, so I will analyze the pathemata used in her performance to explain her successful use of rhetorical devices.

2)      In the equivalent of a 4-5 double-spaced paper, analyze this image, especially for its pathetic appeal.

·         a. describe the context: I found the video on youtube.  The Gulf War had just ended which was an important time period in American History.  The audience was all of the Americans watching the superbowl in person or on tv.  Most Americans were heavily affected by “The Mother of All Battles” and were searching for something to really rejuvenate their American pride.

·         b. explain the emotion(s) this image provokes and how (IOW: what is it in the image that provokes the emotion?): This performance provided Americans with a sense of unity, a swell of pride, and a pat of comfort.

·         c. explain what sort of behavior this image inspires:  This performance encouraged Americans to rejoice that the war was over and to reunite as a nation.

·         d. what is the interpretation that ties the affect to the desired behavior? What does it ask you to believe?

·         e. does the image appeal to stereotypical "types" such as those Aristotle describes in his analysis of age groups?  I think there are many different symbols that resonate with different audiences (more discussion in my analysis.)

3)      Post your analysis on your blog.

4)      Submit your analysis for in-class review and review the analyses of your review partners on the assigned class day.

5)      Link the URL for your blog post to your webfolio by the due date on the syllabus.

Roller Coaster Affect

I really liked Massumi’s discussion of affect.  He separates affect into two main sectors/factors which are qualities and intensity.  He confuses me when he says, “there is no correspondence or conformity between qualities and intensity.  If there is a relation, it is of another nature,” because my spring break experience composed a correspondence between the two, or so I thought.

Over spring break my mom, little brother, and I went to Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington.  I was so happy/shocked that when we got there my 44 year old mother got in line with us to ride each ride.  As the day went on, it became routine for me to give a rating of the “scariness” of the ride based off of my memory.

We eventually worked our way to the roller coaster Judge Roy Scream.  My mom asked for my rating.  I looked at the image of the roller coaster; its high crawls and low drops.  Then I flipped through my mental registry to see what I remembered most about the ride.  I rated the ride an 8, really scary. 

The intensity of the image of the roller coaster was strong.  It had been years since I last ventured to an amusement park, yet the memories of this scary ride lingered within me.  The qualities or context of the image of this ride told me that as I remembered the roller coaster went very fast and was very scary. 

As we approached the front of the line my palms began to sweat and I started getting anxious.  A bit of that might have been due to my expectations for the ride.  However, I think there must have been some type of correlation between me seeing the ride in front of me and remembering the same image from the last time I had rode the roller coaster.  The correlation between the two is what I thought lead to my high ranking of the ride, sweating palms, and anxiety.  The overall affect is that the ride is unpleasant.

What do you think?

Nussbaum and Emotions

In the Nussbaum article we read for class, she makes certain claims that I believe are true, but like everything in life, there's an exception.  Nussbaum claims,

"Thus, rather than having a simple dichotomy between the emotional and (normatively) rational, we have a situation in which all emotions are to some degree "rational" in a descriptive sense - all are to some degree cognitive and based upon belief - and they may then be assessed, as beliefs are assessed, for their normative status,”

which means that a person cannot separate their emotions from their rational.  The two are connected.  She illustrates this claim through an example of anger.  If one is mad it is based upon the belief that someone else has wronged them in some way.  Therefore, the anger is directed at someone or thing and if the person’s perception changes (what they did to me was an accident), then the person’s emotions will change as well or be redirected to something or someone else.

Though Nussbaum argument makes sense for most situations, it doesn’t always ring true because people sometimes feel certain emotions for no particular reason.  My family will be the first to tell people that I can be a bit of a downer at times.  I don’t know why, but every now and again I become the biggest pessimist you’ve seen in your life.  It is not an uncommon event that I wake up in the morning in a pissy mood.  Everything I see or encounter ticks me off.  I’m disgusted with everything for no principal reason.

One time I was having a Debbie downer day.  As I walked across campus on my way to work I saw a boy pass me who pissed me off.  Why?  He was ugly.  I looked at this guy and thought to myself, “GOD! It doesn’t make any sense for anybody to be that ugly,” and was truly disturbed that an ugly person like he was allowed to walk around campus.

Now, I normally don’t behave in the above manner, but because of my mood my emotions were swayed to an unstable level.  So then the next question would be, why was I in such a bad mood?  There is honestly no reason.  Nussbaum should have taken other factors into account when studying the emotions.  One’s mood may affect their emotions, but the mood may not be rational at all.