A Rhetorical Education Podcast

A Rhetorical Education Podcast A Place for Dialogue and Sharing. A Podcast About the Big Talk of Life, Reality, and More. It is the quest for nuance in a world that doesn't appreciate it..

The podcast aims to explore topics and ideas of rhetoric, philosophy, comic books and more.

06/08/2022

Podcast is on hiatus till the end of the summer, but look for a season 3 trailer coming on the 4th July!!!

Come with me to a digital version of my poster presentation at the annual Claflin University celebration of the Humaniti...
04/20/2022

Come with me to a digital version of my poster presentation at the annual Claflin University celebration of the Humanities. Take a pictue slideshow stroll (below) through the lobby of the Fine Arts Building. Wander to follow the arrows that lead you to a poster and a QR code that unlocks a digital experience of how comic books are made and terminology found within. ENJOY!

Postcard Thoughts 1(that I wrote down so you can experience a peak on my brain from afar) I finished listening to a book...
04/18/2022

Postcard Thoughts 1
(that I wrote down so you can experience a peak on my brain from afar)

I finished listening to a book by Johan Harari about depression. In one of the chapters he opens by talking about a Native American who talked about and lived his life as if it had ended after the arrival of white people. He mourned the loss of his people’s hunting traditions and ultimately that they were “penned” inside reservations. He doesn’t talk about afterwards because to him, though he lived on, his life ended that day. Anything about his life were telling stopped.

The thought it provoked inside of me was an idea that I think is innate to certain countries today. I’m not equating the despair of white people in any way to what they have done to native populations, but I think there is a mythological imperative built into the people who conquered/colonized places like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Central and South American countries.

The imperative is not always pulsing away, it fluctuates in strength, often based on how strong the country perceives itself, both realistically and mythologically. It tends to focus on a desire for expansion, like myths about sharks or the Roman empire, to stop is to die. It is keenly locked on an idealized conception of exploration, of pushing frontiers, struggle, conflict, and very often religious conceptions of masculinity.

When such ability, both in space and time dwindle, the imperative remains and it builds even when inactive, like water behind a dam. In certain places it can begin to leak out. The leaks can be highly self-destructive, more like radioactive waste than water. The self-destruction falls upon those who mythologize and perpetuate the imperative of conquest and colonization. They cannot tame the impulse. But where else can they go?

This imperative has remained an element inside humanity for much longer than the past 500 years. It is both a positive and a negative one. But it remains for some, an imperative they cannot shake.

In America right now, it’s really dawning on those who want to believe in the expansive mythological imperative that the myth is floundering, drowning. It’s supporters are under attack, from modernity.

Their moral panic to restore the myth has given way to reductive and unrealistic nostalgia for a fiction. They are seeking to be soldiers because there is no other purpose for them now. They crave a great adventure, a new manifest destiny.

Without it, they now turn upon their fellow countrymen, anyone who does not think like they do, look like they do, or pray like they do.

So, my mind turns to an idea, it’s a long shot. rocket ships. No, hear me out, perhaps we give those who want this old myth back, this imperative they crave, the opportunity to do something with it. Get Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos on the phone. I have men wanting to go to Mars, even if they don’t quite realize it yet.

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