Geoff Dyer puts Michael Fried, academic writing on blast

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric 4 Comments

British author Geoff Dyer in a boat somewhere nice

Holy crap, you guys: Geoff Dyer, author of the masterful Out of Sheer Rage and a bunch of other rad books, now has a regular column in the New York Times Book Review. His inaugural piece is a brutal assessment of academic writing as perfected by Michael Fried, whose Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before tells you what you need to know about the author’s prose pretty much from the title. If you take out the adverbial clauses, you’re left with “Photography Matters.” Also, when we’re talking about photography mattering as never before, we’re looking at a window of about 170 years, since it definitely did not matter before the invention of the daguerrotype camera. These flaws distract from the big fissure, though: Fried’s borderline compulsive tendency to say what he will set out to accomplish, recap what he has argued, explain what he is not saying, et cetera. Dyer does a fine job of eviscerating this convention of academic and critical writing, and in doing so indirectly indicts the cornerstone of writing instruction: the thesis statement.

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Dr. Laura and when it is okay to say the n-word

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric 10 Comments

Pretty much every picture of her is funny if you imagine her saying it.

The short answer to the question posed above, as Dr. Laura Schlessinger demonstrated last week, is “Not eleven times on your nationally syndicated radio show.” If you haven’t heard the clip, I invite you to check it out, if only for the theoretical demonstration of what an n-word valve breaking would sound like. Like Michael Richards before her, Dr. Laura gets started and she just can’t stop.

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Rhetoric watch: Krugman on the disintegration of government

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric 6 Comments

"Allowing our mascot to be hunted to near-extinction since 1849."

In the course of last Friday’s Link Roundup, we mentioned that members of the Department of the Interior tasked with regulating the oil industry were revealed to have “[taken] bribes and engaged in drug use and sex with oil industry officials” in 2008. That was awesome. In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman promises more cops-‘n-robbers-get-together-to-do-coke-and-shout-out-the-window-of-the-squad-car frivolity with the headline, “Sex & Drugs & the Spill.” It turns out that’s just a come on, though, for a column about how anti-government sentiment can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the kind of thing you need to do when you’re competing for eyes with Freakonomics. It’s like when Maureen Dowd wrote about the hot, throbbing need for derivatives regulation.*

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Dept. of Finally: Obama points out that Sarah Palin knows little about tactical nuclear warfare

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric 3 Comments

"This question will obviously require further research, and I'm just spitballing here, but could we—using advancements in technology—eventually make the nuclear weapons atomic?"

First of all, I’d like to apologize for how long it took us to get the Department of Finally up and running. It’s been the first thing on our agenda since the inception of Combat! blog, but you know how it is, what with the Department of Planning, the Department of Eventually, the Department of Interrupting, the Department of Penultimate, and the Department of Dragging Out Jokes That Only One of Us Finds Amusing all clamoring for our attention. Now that that’s taken care of: President Obama took advantage of the Combat! news blackout Friday to dismiss Sarah Palin’s criticism of his nuclear posture. “I really have no response. Because last I checked, Sarah Palin’s not much of an expert on nuclear issues,” the President told George Stephanopoulos, who immediately began hooting and running around in a circle while pawing at the air before sitting down, straightening his tie, taking a deep breath and then shouting “Oh, snap!” directly into the ear of Michelle Malkin. “If the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff are comfortable with it,” Obama continued, “I’m probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin.”

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Not cool: Obama authorizes assassination of American citizen

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric 5 Comments

Barack Obama, seconds before slowly rotating his hand downward

I think I speak for all of us when I say goddammit, dude. An unnamed “US official” has confirmed that Anwar Al-Awlaki, alleged terrorist and certain dickhead, is on the list of people whom the CIA is allowed to kill. If, like me, you have become momentarily distracted by the thought of how awesome and creepy such a list is—hey, CIA operatives, if you’re having a panini or whatever and you happen to see Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, go ahead and stab him in the face—allow me to bring you back to sobriety by pointing out that Al-Awlaki is an American citizen. He’s also believed to occupy a significant leadership position in Al Qaeda, a probably true fact that I learned from reading an article in the Washington Post. At the time, that same article said that Al-Awlaki was “thought to have been killed”—an assessment that, coming as it did from the same military and civilian intelligence sources that decided he was a high-ranking Al Qaeda officer in the first place, casts a little doubt on the “Anwar Al-Awlaki is a terrorist so it’s okay if we whack him” argument. God forbid he’s just an asshole, because he’s an American asshole, and we have rules.

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