Uncategorized – RHETORICAL CRITIC

Anything could happen. A divided nation awaits the result of a coin flip, though with much of Trump’s side having already decided to not honor the result, we’re in weird cyber-1860s territory.

Tons of pollsters and pundits, professional and not, are all making predictions, but all the data I’ve seen is inconclusive, and to top off an already bad situation, if much of the country doesn’t accept the result, it won’t matter what the result is.

So that’s my prediction. The collective national trust in factual information will continue to erode. Entropy, having the physical world firmly in hand for all time, now assaults meaning itself via the internet, with a critical mass of willing henchmen with easy access to worldwide platforms, living in nations built out of symbols, eagerly destroying any symbol they can in the supposed name of symbol-preservation.

It’s not that the center cannot hold; despite the old poem, I’ve found it generally does, because it is always being rebuilt by another generation. But the post-internet English language doesn’t seem capable anymore of rendering a word like “center” to mean the same thing to enough people, and so saying it can “hold” or “not hold” is rapidly becoming a meaningless statement.

That’s the difference between now and 1860; the old North and South knew exactly what even the euphemisms meant. As John Mosby put it succinctly long after the war in 1894, responding to several decades of Lost Cause bullshit: “…I always understood that we went to War on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery.”

Down below the muck of modern English, the “quarrel” remains. Some want rules for others but not for themselves; the rest want rules for all to protect all.