Overnight Shift

A short & sweet story...

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The best part of working the overnight shift at the Bostock has to be taking the C-2 from East campus to West. Every Thursday at midnight, my bus arrives and for a few minutes I no longer control the time of my arrival, as that late-night bus follows its whirligig route from stop to stop. Sometimes I wish the bus would never reach its final destination: that I might remain a passenger for eternity, faultless for my tardiness.

I found this particular night’s ride not unusual. Accompanied only by my bus driver, I boarded the bus and we soon began our weekly ritual. I closed my eyes and lay my head against the window, lulled by the vibration of the road, and the warm night air. I did my best to forget about my upcoming math test, and the fights of earlier in the day.

About midway through the ride I noticed two others had boarded the bus. They were two upperclassmen from central, and they were unmistakably a couple. They sat near the back of the bus, in the little narrow aisle, talking quietly. The boy had a cap of faded blue, and hole-ripped jeans, with a narrow hawkish face. The girl was passably pretty, with watery blue eyes. There was nothing conspicuous about them, nothing particularly noticeable, until we rounded the circle at the base of Chapel Drive, when it suddenly became obvious that this was an Occasion—in fact, some sort of anniversary.

It arrived in the form of a simple ring, and a kiss on the cheek, with one bright blue stone in the band. I tried not to notice, as the girl blushed with shy exuberance over her little surprise. As the only other on the bus, I tried not to reveal too totally my attention, which proved helpful, because it was clear that the boy had not planned to stop at a little gift. He began to kiss and fondle with awkward motions, which clearly left the girl hotly embarrassed and unhappy.

I looked at him, and I saw this and I thought, “Oh, now, don’t be like that!” But he was like that, and as soon as his little gift had been deposited on the finger of his girl, and her rejection to his advances became obvious, out of the corner of my vision I saw him whisper something to her under his breath—some punishing thing, quick and curt and unkind. I couldn’t bear to look at them then, so I instead closed my eyes.

The scene reminded me of my relationship with a girl from high school, L—, who always had a kind word, and laughed at my jokes. A girl with whom I could waste an hour or a day and not feel the time was wasted.

I could not help but think of my own transgressions. I thought of how I had pushed and prodded and poked at L—, believing it my right to have my desires satisfied. She had not rejected my advances like the girl on the bus, though I knew she wished to. I tried hard to forget how I had forced her too quickly, how I had mistaken physical intimacy for an emotional connection, and about the gulf of silence that separated us now.

But there was no forgetting. And as the jolting rumble-strips before the West Campus stop brought me awake once again, my searching eyes could not find the little couple of my dream. And as the driver brought the bus into its destination, I sat there for a moment, crying quietly and heartbrokenly and hopelessly, all to myself, wishing that the C-2 would carry me on for eternity, faultless for my tardiness.

College Culture – How Our Campuses Shape Us

The first year of college is always hard. The academic and social climate of any new place means change and adaptation. For many, we are far from home – without family, or friends until we find them.

But something infinitely more interesting to me goes beyond the traditional experiences we college students face – and instead focuses on the peculiarities of the institutions we attend. Though one might think, with their constant shuffling of faculty and positions, that yes, we can all agree linear algebra here is linear algebra there, and Faulkner wrote the same impossible books interlaced with indecipherable adjectives at every University campus we could choose to attend. But one thing that besets me with concern, resides in the very different identities we find at the places we have chosen.

As Duke emerges from its reading period before its finals, Harvard has two weeks to go before its starts. And while we reel from a campus besieged by a “culture of crassness” Harvard buzzes with existential questions: they have a plagiarist in their midst, and their scandal, like that of our lacrosse team, has ignited an undercurrent.

But the undercurrent they engage seems far divorced from that which we have seen. While we talk about an undercurrent of race and class inequity, they talk about an all-consuming competition, which drives them to lie and cheat to get ahead. While we talk about a transgression of the body and soul, they reel from transgressions of the mind. Our students cry out for the freedom to “study hard, and play hard when we’re through” – their students, well, they study and trash the other guy’s room of they can get away with it.

Reading passages from The Crimson I learn of a world I cannot imagine. While I felt like every college student endeavored only for free Friday’s and free Booze, they see a world where every college student endeavors only for more money and better grades. I realize that we at Duke are unique – beset by our own problems: but these situations we face have the potential to alter modes and methods of thinking for a lifetime.

This concept intrigues me on a number of levels. Both this plagiarism and our lacrosse situation color my conversations with those at Harvard that I once knew in high school, and ever more increasingly, I see our paths diverging. While I admit that I once dreamed of living in a land of pure intellectualism and unbridled scholarship, one that lacked our “party hard!” attitude, the more I read and speak with Harvard-ites, the more I count my blessings.

Yet, I do count my blessings. Every day we are shaped into the people we shall be tomorrow. And at Duke, with each passing day, I see us rise beyond hate, fear, and class-consciousness. We speak about all of these things openly, almost innocently, even amidst a “culture of crassness.” At Harvard, they are faced with a “culture of cut-throat competition,” and I daresay many are true believers. They would lie, cheat, steal, and deceive to get ahead because they have to win. How do you talk honestly with someone about that?

Duke Journal of Public Affairs

The Duke Journal of Public Affairs has officially been released online. You can read it at http://www.dukejournal.org

Article From Harvard Crimson

Andrew, considering that this is Duke-related, I thought that it might interest you. It's an article that was published today in the Harvard student newspaper.

Stripper Ergo...Rape?

If women want respect from men, they need to respect each other

Published On Wednesday, April 12, 2006 1:35 AM

By ASHTON R. LATTIMORE

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With all of the controversy surrounding the current rape scandal involving the lacrosse team at Duke University, one detail continually makes its way to the forefront of the media storm: The alleged victim is an exotic dancer. Of course, it’s to be expected that people would take at least some notice of this fact, given that it is a crucial part of the sequence of events that explains why she was at the team party in the first place. However, in a troubling number of newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, television discussions, and my own daily conversations, the fact that this woman is a stripper is advanced as some sort of explanation as to why the alleged rape occurred: “Well, she is a stripper,” they say. “I’m never surprised when strippers get raped.”

And, if we’re being completely honest here, neither am I. Saddened, appalled, and troubled, yes. But never surprised. This lack of shock comes as a direct result of the way we’re socialized to think of people’s behavior in completely linear fashion—if A, then B. In this logic, if she is a stripper, and consents to have her body objectified on a regular basis, then she must on some level be open to the possibility of complete violation of her body as well. That—the idea that being a stripper can actually be a “step” on the way to rape, rather than an end in it itself—seems like the logical conclusion.

This inability to view people’s—particularly women’s—actions as independent and not necessarily indicative of some other aspect of their lives extends outside of the issue of rape to many smaller concerns, the most familiar of those being the tried-and-true idea that if a woman dresses a certain way, dances a certain way, or flirts with too many different men, then she must be a slut. These assumptions—whether they prove to be true or not, and they often don’t—have ruined reputations since time immemorial.

The easy thing to do in this situation would be to blame men for kissing and telling, destroying women’s public images and reputations, and propagating words like “slut” and “ho” in everyday conversation. But men aren’t really the problem. How often do you really hear a guy call a woman a “ho” in daily conversation, at least in mixed company? These days, most don’t have the nerve to do so in front of other women, for fear of having a pack of pseudo-feminists jump down their throats hurling accusations of misogyny. However, not a day goes by that I don’t hear a woman (sadly, often myself included) making derogatory remarks about another female in front of other women, in front of men, in front of anyone really. Usually based on evidence that is questionable and unconfirmed at best—if it even exists at all—these remarks are nevertheless allowed to go unchecked, quite often with other women joining in on the fun. It is a double standard that no one ever talks about.

However, when women treat each other in such a cruel and disrespectful manner, it opens the door for men to do the same. Essentially, women help to create a culture of assumption that establishes—especially in terms of sexuality—damaging and incorrect ideas about the implications of other women’s behaviors. This, in turn, can lead others to act out against marked women by speaking unkindly about them (as Rush Limbaugh recently did, calling the alleged rape victim in the Duke case a “ho” on his nationally syndicated radio show), shunning them, or, in extreme cases, raping them. Further, this culture makes it acceptable to disrespect or minimize the plight of alleged rape victims of “questionable character,” because we assume on some level that rape was an inevitabile or a logical conclusion to their behavior.

By focusing on “explanations” for why rape occurs—explanations that subtly shift blame onto the alleged victim—we can lose sight of the most important facts of the situation. In the Duke lacrosse case, the alleged victim is not a ho or a stripper, she is a woman, a human being who has been through a traumatic experience, and, as such, is worthy only of our deepest sympathy and support, not attempts to use her behavior to rationalize or excuse what may have happened to her. To create a culture that is truly safe for and respectful of women, we women must first learn to treat each other the way we expect men to treat us, hold everyone to the same standard, and check our assumptions at the door.



Ashton R. Lattimore ’08 is an English concentrator in Dunster House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.

Political Advertising

I'm not sure if this is exactly along the lines of this blog (this whole phenomenon is somewhat new to me!), but I just finished a paper on political advertising and thought I'd post it. :) Justine

Truth and Political Advertising

Gone are the days of campaign barbeques, songs about “lovin’ the gov,” buttons for “Tippecanoe and Tyler too!” More quaint methods of political advertisement have today been replaced by 60-second television “spot” commercials. These commercials not only consume most of candidates’ campaign budgets, but also have become “the most viewed of all available forms of political advertising” (Jamieson). As such, we must question whether the information that they provide voters with is truthful. The classical rhetoricians Aristotle and Plato identified two parties in a rhetorical exchange: the speaker and the audience. Each placed the responsibility for truthfulness on a different party. Plato trusted the speaker to present only fact and the audience to draw logical, or truthful, conclusions. Aristotle believed that the speaker should identify truth and then use whatever rhetorical means necessary to convince his audience of it. The problem with these two theories is that each assumes ethical behavior on the part of one of the participants. When either party is unethical, truth falls prey to rhetorical manipulation. The solution to this dilemma is to introduce a third, disinterested party whose sole purpose is to promote truth, and thus implement a system of checks-and-balances that challenge falsehood. Consider two political ads from the presidential election of 1992: Guess and Maine. Guess is more rhetorically virtuous, but Maine a more effective, advertisement. This underscores the longstanding conflict between Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophies, and illustrates that, because speakers and audiences cannot always be trusted to be ethical, a healthy participatory democracy needs a party to advocate truth.

Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories of classical rhetoric are helpful in that they provide us with a foundation from which to discuss political advertising. Plato’s theory is that “Ethos is altered by logos through the medium of Pathos” (Mackin). In more modern language, Plato believes that when an audience is presented with logic, this logic induces an emotional reaction, which in turn induces a judgment on the character of whoever is being discussed. Plato believes that in the three-part equation of logic-emotional reaction-judgment of character (logos-pathos-ethos), logic is fundamental. He demands, therefore, that the speaker provide only logic, or facts, and leaves the responsibility to the audience to draw logical and truthful conclusions from these facts. From Plato’s perspective, attempting to convince an audience through emotional appeal would be manipulative and unethical. Aristotle does not deny the validity of Plato’s three-part equation, but weights each component’s relative importance differently. He believes that the strategy of providing an audience with only logic and asking audience members to draw their own conclusions is fallible because it demands that audience members be actively engaged in the process and willing to learn, and some people are simply unwilling to invest the thought or energy necessary to formulate their own logical conclusions. Therefore, Aristotle argues, sometimes a speaker, in order to effectively argue truth, must use as a “mode of persuasion […] notions possessed by everybody”: pathos and ethos. He does not consider this unethical. Plato’s method assumes a virtuous audience. Aristotle’s method assumes a virtuous speaker. Unfortunately, this is naïve. Some humans are virtuous, some are not; therefore, we are certain to encounter both audiences and speakers who are little concerned with truth. Those select human individuals who are concerned with virtue, therefore, must contest those who would spread falsehood by advertising fact.

Before discussing Guess and Maine in terms of classical rhetorical theory, we must define who the speakers and intended audiences of these advertisements are. In Guess, the speaker is the Republican Party, symbolized by presidential candidate George Bush. In Maine, the speaker is the Democratic Party, symbolized by presidential candidate Bill Clinton. Both advertisements speak to the same audience: a middle-class swing voter. These ads attempt to present new information and not to confirm existing biases. The Republican message explains to the voter why he should care about Democratic tax policy, which an ardent Republican would already know. The Democrat’s advertisement tells the voter how Bush’s lack of integrity could affect him personally, which an ardent Democrat would be aware of. With these speakers and this audience in mind, let us consider the role that logos, pathos, and ethos plays in each advertisement.

Guess appeals more strongly to logos than Maine does. In Guess, the Republican Party attacks Democratic policy through presentation of fact: “[Clinton] increased the sales tax by 33 percent” or “Clinton has promised to increase government spending by 220 billion dollars” (The Living Room Candidate). The speaker assumes that the audience looks unfavorably on tax increases. Maine does not attack policy; the fact that it does present, “this Houston Hotel has already saved George Bush over $165,000 in Maine taxes,” attacks character.

Maine appeals more strongly to pathos than Guess does. Guess attempts to make audience members fear for their own financial well-being by implying with a rhetorical question, “Guess where he’ll get the money?”, that Clinton’s tax increases will be financed by individual voters’ savings. Maine uses the same technique, attempting to frighten its own audience with the question, “And when George Bush saves $165,000 in taxes, guess who makes up the difference?” Verbally, then, the two ads make equal appeals to pathos—but Maine uses additional cinematographic peripheral cues (Milburn and Brown) as more sly means of persuasion. The advertisement shows photographs of George Bush participating in stereotypically elite activities such as boating and golfing, as well as a photograph of the mansion that the presidential candidate calls home, in order to visually arouse the viewer’s anger that Bush leads a posh lifestyle while forcing her to pay for it.

Though both ads appeal to ethos, in Guess the appeal is secondary, whereas in Maine it is the spot’s focus. Guess attempts to construct an affinity between the speaker and the audience based on ethos. The advertisement tells the viewer that Clinton raised state taxes—“but not just on the rich” (The Living Room Candidate). This statement implies that there are three parties in question: Clinton, the rich, and everyone else, and puts the speaker and the viewer together in the “everyone else” category. Maine, rather than emphasizing the similarities of character between speaker and audience, attempts to highlight the differences of character between presidential candidate Bush and the middle-class viewer. The advertisement does this by portraying Bush as elite and out-of-touch with the average voter’s reality. Further, Maine’s central argument is an ad-hominem attack that calls into question candidate Bush’s ethos. Since, for eighteen percent of voters, the most important issue on Election Day is whether or not the candidate is “someone you can trust” (NBC News), discrediting Bush is essential to the Democratic campaign. Maine suggests that Bush is taking advantage of loopholes in the US tax system by living in one state, Maine, but claiming residency in another, Texas, where taxes are more favorable to his financial situation. This implies that Bush shirks his duties as a citizen, is irresponsible, and is dishonest. This advertisement probably chose taxes as its focus in allusion to another recent incident that cast Bush’s ethos in a negative light. In 1990, in response to the faltering of the US Economy in the late 1980s, President Bush had been forced to revoke his “no new taxes” 1988 campaign promise and sign the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which raised taxes. In alluding to this, the Democratic spot reminds voters that Bush’s has already proved to be dishonest. This two-handed punch effectively damages the image of Bush’s ethos.

Guess, with its foundation in logos, is the more virtuous advertisement but Maine, with its foundation in pathos and ethos, the more effective one. This is representative of the television campaigns waged during the 1992 election. In her summary of the “Characteristics of 1992 General Election Spots,” Lynda Kaid finds that the Republican ads had slightly more “logical appeal” than the Democratic ads; 46.9 percent of Republican ads appealed to logic, while only 46.2 percent of the Democratic ads did. Admittedly, this difference is small; however, she also found that only 21.9 percent of the Republican ads appealed to emotion, whereas 46.2 percent of the Democratic ads did. In a 1992 poll of Southern registered voters, only 19 percent of respondents found Bush’s ads more effective, while 31 percent found Clinton’s ads persuasive. Guess and the Republican campaign, then, adhered more to the Platonic method of providing fact and asking the audience to draw its own logical and truthful conclusions. Maine and the Democratic campaign assumed that the Democratic message was virtuous, and thus, in Aristotelian fashion, used pathos and ethos freely as means of persuasion. Why was the Democratic campaign more effective? Did the audience absorb Guess’s logos and then, through analysis of fact, draw the conclusion that Republican policy was flawed? Did the virtue of Democratic ideals shine through their rhetorical use of pathos and ethos? While such optimistic thought is appealing, observation shows that the audience is simply unable or unwilling to process logos and is more effectively persuaded by pathos and ethos.

While the average voter thinks that he values logos, his opinions are swayed by appeals to pathos and ethos. In a 1992 poll of Southern registered voters, 44 percent of respondents claimed that they watched ads to “learn about issues,” as opposed to only 34 percent who claimed that they watched as to “judge candidates’ personal qualities.” In Ohio, in 2004, according to “testing of political ads and interviews of voters conducted by USA TODAY” voters “said that they disliked negative ads” (USA Today, September 27, 2004). However, in the 2004 presidential election, candidates’ “moral values,” which are inherently concerned not with logic, but with emotion and character, were the issues that decided how 40 percent of voters cast their ballots (pollingreport.com). In Ohio, “the commercial that had the most effect on whom [a swing voter] might vote for was a [negative] attack ad” (USA Today, September 27, 2004). In short, though voters want to think that they are members of Plato’s virtuous audience and esteem fact, in reality, “facts have nothing to do with what people’s opinions are and will be” (ibid).

Here, again, we run into the millennial tension between Platonic and Aristotelian visions and reality. Yes, as Plato believes, ideally a speaker should be virtuous, trust the members of his audience, and present them with fact. But audiences can’t be trusted to draw logical and truthful conclusions. Yes, as Aristotle argues, therefore audiences must be instructed through pathos and ethos. But what about when speakers use appeals to emotion and character to manipulate?

Acknowledging that we can trust neither all speakers nor all audiences to be virtuous and to adhere to truth, the solution, then, is to introduce a third, disinterested party whose only purpose is to promote truth. We must implement a rhetorical system of checks-and-balances modeled in much the same way as the United States government. America’s founding fathers trusted neither the elite (the executive) nor the populace (the legislative) to be virtuous all of the time. Thus, they introduced a third branch (the judicial) whose sole purpose was to interpret the constitution and, effectively, define the country’s nature. In rhetoric, the elite speaker and popular audience already exist. What we need is a “judicial branch”: a politically neutral third party that can filter rhetoric for fact and falsehood.

The media can fill this role. In the 1992 election, individual journalists concerned that the truth wasn’t “getting out there” started to write “ad watch” newspaper articles. “The goals of the various journalists were […] to check facts in the ads to make sure they were correct, to ‘identify lies as lies’” (Milburn and Brown). Some journalists even wanted to “analyze the use of drama and visuals and the role they played in the overall process of manipulation” (ibid). Today, internet sites such as Factcheck.org “monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases” (factcheck.org) and advertise truth. Media monitoring of political advertisements effectively reduces the potential manipulative effects of rhetoric; in 1992, ad watch columns “increased the amount of thinking about the ads, allowing subjects to access information and feelings about the candidates and the ads that did not come to mind when simply watching the ads” (Milburn and Brown).

Plato and Aristotle’s visions have long been in conflict because the rhetoricians limited their visions to two-party exchanges and did not know with whom to place the burden of truth. In modern society, in order to protect ourselves from deception, we must approach politics skeptically and trust neither the speaker nor the audience to be logical. Those individuals concerned with the virtue of logic in television campaign advertising, therefore, must not only use other forms of media such as newspapers and the internet to dispute falsehood and advertise fact, but must do so so persuasively as to contend with rhetorically manipulative, million-dollar campaign advertisements.

Click here for the Works Cited

Patriotism

What follows is the opening of what I hope will be an essay of self-reflection

There are prisons of stone and prisons of ideas. Throughout his history, man has struggled to escape both of their analogs, the technological shortcomings that prevent him from claiming to know God, and the precepts of faith which have allowed some among his caste to account for that deficiency.

Caesar knew the value of the latter. So did the Pharaohs. Their proclamations of divinity were not acts of vanity or attrition, but adhesive acts, which brought about empires long before our modern conception of imperialism.

Aha! A question there, what changed? Certainly Napoleon crowned himself emperor, but not even he had the audacity to call himself God. Though one might account for that, at Waterloo, when down to the last man and invited to surrender, Count Etienne’s phrase rang with the power of any faithful martyr, “The Guard dies, it does not surrender!”

These were patriots. For a new order had arisen, the nation. The nation man stands apart, more powerful than a simple theocrat, prepared to die for God yes, but also for his current commander. Should his commander die, he is replaceable, as an agent of the state. For you see, Rome and Egypt fell because their emperors soon believed the lie of their own divinity. The nation, an immortal enforcer of belief on Earth, accounted for its deaths.

For in the history of man, these twin masters have guarded against the usurper and the rebel. Like any prison, the prison of devotion is above all, stable. And for a thousand years, or more, the nations and races of this Earth fought their wars, and argued their dilemmas in this safe enclosure, unconsciously casting God and Nation into a singular deity, one which granted the laws, and one which provided for their enforcement.

Of course, this order remains self-consistent, and obvious, and certainly, the alternatives to incarceration in these walls, are fierce: anarchy, chaos, and disorder.

Yet, the turning century brings new questions. Noted earlier, there have always been stone walls as well, walls of a physical dimension, a technological dimension, which allowed the nation and its god fertility. Perhaps the internet, or mass communication, or our generation’s ethical malaise provided the catalysis, but whatever the cause, these walls stand no longer.

“I am a patriot,” no longer means what it once did. The spiritual dimension has left us completely, and now our society rests on the razors edge. Without belief (which a nation could not sustain alone), a fundamental question arises. What does it mean to be what I am? Yes, we are defined from birth by a particular social, political, and economic order – but these do not bind the spirit, and only naively to they harness the mind. The shackles of belief, which as Kierkegaard elucidated in his eloquent treatises on freedom, are gone.

The compelling aspect of this enunciation, is that it describes the present. No where are broad conclusions sought on the ageless nature of man – rather I address the most temporal and narrow question I can. Should I sever the ties, whatever they may be, that I hold me to this nation? Has the day come that I no longer think of myself as a citizen of the United States, but as a citizen of humanity? Could I stand to even call myself by that moniker?

Is the Black Church Preaching Nonsense?

Is the Black Church a positive force in modern society? No. Casting all political correctness aside, I ignore the usual taboo that shields people's religious beliefs and discuss this matter in my article, "Preaching Nonsense."

-Trey

Read: Preaching Nonsense - The Black Church in Contemporary Society