Category Archives: Rhetorical Mastery

Masters of Political Cartooning

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One image is all we need to see a problem in a leader’s words or actions.

A new theatrical documentary on the work of political cartoonist Pat Oliphant is running in a few theaters, but even a preview of The Savage Act: The Life and Cartoons of Pat Oliphant is a useful reminder of the wonderful pen and ink drawings that used to run daily in most city newspapers. As with Oliphant, sometimes it was a poison pen.

Oliphant was a political cartoonist at The Denver Post. I was lucky to grow up seeing his irreverent take on the self-important political leaders of the day. We have social media artists who carry on the tradition of puncturing the pretenses of our leaders, often using fake photos. But many are amateurs compared to the political cartoonists that thrived at newspapers through all of the 20th Century. Along with Herblock, Mike Luckovich, Paul Conrad and others, Oliphant offered timely jabs at officials who favored false but sober explanations for their actions.

Where contemporary political humor focuses more on the visual, most of the older breed included a verbal tag that added potency to the images. The economy of the images set the tone, and the text give them irony and bite. Think of Stephen Colbert as the long form equivalent to the one-off cartoons that Oliphant and his peers turned out on almost a daily basis. In the 10,000 cartoons he contributed—eventually winning a Pulitzer Prize—he made the case for this wonderful form as “a serious expression of political thought.”  Luckily, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate was among the organizations that spread the work of these master commentators available to many more newspapers.

Paul Conrad

Rhetorically, a good political cartoon is a synecdoche: a single and potent representation of a much larger phenomenon. One suggestive image and its language is all we need to pick up on a a problem with a leader’s words or actions.  Evocations of irreverence are common in these efforts to puncture pretense.

Some great work by newer artists can still be seen in Politico, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. But this group was never more powerful than when they captured the eyes of readers anxious for their daily fix from their local newspaper.  Count the loss of this daily political art as one of the casualties in the decline of American newspaper readership.

Caricatures of our last ten Presidents                                                                                        Pat Oliphant                                                                             

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How Much of Yourself Would You Give To an Avatar?

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Why would we cede to strangers the most characteristic elements of our presence?

Several recent YouTube videos have shown experiments where a person agrees to work with an A. I. firm to create an avatar to stand in for themselves. The effort involves a little more work than I thought: lots of sampling of one’s voice and body to get enough “data” to create a passable clone. For some reasons this has some appeal, even beyond gaming.

Wikipedia cary grant
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To be sure, many of us are required to put in facetime with groups that can drain our energies. I remember a faculty meeting where we had an extended debate about what kind of pencils to pass out at open houses. It would have been nice to have an avatar sit through that discussion. Similarly, those obligatory photos of faculty found in a hallway just outside of most academic departments can be awkward. I always thought that I might quietly slip in a picture of the classic film star, Cary Grant, above my name. The narcissists passing by would never notice. But others might quickly recognize that Grant’s agreeable likeness is nothing like the prickly guy they know from faculty meetings.

As a rhetorician I am interested in the process,where we pass off someone’s, nay, some electronic device’s efforts to stand in for our personal rhetoric.  Among other things, A.I. is about finding another way to clothe part of ourselves.

But why would we cede to strangers the most characteristic elements of our presence? Think of living life with only a collection of greeting card words to represent our feelings, or depending on the slack descriptive prose of a high school textbook to describe everything else. Most of us would hate these limitations. We’ve worked hard in life to acquire a recognizable and successful identity that reflects our experiences and values.

We all carry unique rhetorical fingerprints.

If I was still in a classroom on a daily basis—and characteristically overestimating my persuasive powers–this would be the point I would want to pass on to my students. They should insist on the perogative to speak in their own authentic voice. No A.I. system is going to get it quite right. How could it? Lived experience is unique to our biological selves, not to silicon-based and generic memories pasted together by an anonymous organization in our name. By early adulthood we have already earned the right to see and describe the world in our terms. Achieving a coherent and specific lexicon is a significant developmental achievement, a kind of rhetorical fingerprint. Ceding control of the ways we leave our mark on the world is fool’s errand. It is one thing to sing another’s song. It is altogether different to allow any other source to speak in our name.

Of course my logic includes the premise that we see our discourse as an extension of our authentic selves. But straight discursive prose tends to be generic: the same kind of language you might find in a Wikipedia article or a textbook. Some students asked to write about what they do not yet fully know may be only too happy to pick up anything already written that they can claim, even though this is plagiarism. In assigned reports and summaries of events, schools encourage student writing that is disassociating and neutral. The defining fingerprints of any author will be concealed. Even so, pure exposition tied to one’s own avatar won’t garner much interest. Who really wants to be a talking encyclopedia? Most of us need to have a unique rhetorical style that is ours alone. This is what it means to earn the honor of authentic authorship.