About Me
I'm a writing teacher with a background in rhetoric, composition, and writing program administration, and I'm a drummer. For the last few years I’ve focused my research on gun rights rhetoric, and I use the Guns & Rhetoric blog here to work out ideas. I also post occasionally on teaching, things I’m reading or watching, and other stuff in the Teaching & Culture blog. If you’d like to see my CV and academic publications and presentations, my Academia.edu profile is here. The drum stuff is on Instagram. Thanks for stopping by!
Recent Posts on Guns & Rhetoric
We can think of guns as a pollutant in the US for the same reason we can similarly define noise, light, and carbon dioxide: all were once part of a relatively stable, not overly disruptive environment but have increased to a degree that massively changes our lived experience and, in some cases, cause great harm.
I have a new article out in this edited collection of papers delivered at the 2022 Rhetoric Society of America conference. My chapter talks about how carrying a gun in public gets defined as a type of care work. Care work like nursing or teaching, parenting or elder care, is usually associated with women or femininity, but I’m arguing that carrying gets coded as care work for men.
If your version of liberty is a life awash in firearms, then what you really mean by “freedom” is “risk.” But this semantic switcheroo is not simply a matter of being uninformed about the dangers of firearms; it’s also about being more scared of threats to your identity than threats to your life.
Viewed properly in their full context, these opinions are soaked in blood, yet death is omitted from their pages. There are no bullet wounds. No dead children. No husbands standing over their dead wives with a hot gun in their hands. No mass shooters taunting their hunted victims. There are, in short, no bodies. Like an efficient mob hit, the court’s majority opinion has hidden them.
For many of us who think wearing a mask in a pandemic is the most sensible, obvious thing in the world, it’s perplexing and frustrating to watch mask-wearing become a political issue. How did this happen? I think it’s because “freedom” has come to mean “risk,” especially unnecessary risk, and that pro-gun rhetoric is one of the key places in U.S. culture where this transformation has taken place.
In the hands of gun-rights folks, this line of reasoning can be used to justify violence against protesters of all kinds. And because the gun-rights movement is largely white, largely opposed to the political interests of non-whites, and specifically freaked out by Black Lives Matter, this logic, which starts with a Black man defending himself against a racist white mob, is used to justify shooting Black people protesting for their right not to be shot.
In short, the gun has become a symbol of the powers the state has given over to private citizens. A gun isn’t just a tool you shoot things with, it’s a symbol to be waved in public whenever government is seen to exceed its authority. A gun – especially a big, showy, military-style gun – is way of telling government it doesn’t have the powers its representatives think it has, because those powers have been slowly ceded to individuals.
Recent Posts on Everything Else
We’re nearly a week into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and I’ve thought a lot about whether and how to address it in my composition classes. My starting place is this: valuing democracy, and seeing the invasion as part of a global attack on democratic values and institutions. And of course I need to tie that in with what we do in writing classes.
This blog post from Stanford economist John Cochrane is a critique of diversity & inclusion statements, which many academics must write when applying for jobs at universities, and it rehashes some of the (I think tired) arguments against them.
Take Control is the third album from Year of the Dragon, an L.A.-based metal/funk/rap outfit with an arsenal of heavy riffs, deep grooves, and songs that move easily between chilled-out neighborhood strolls and politically conscious tirades. It’s a skillful album with a big heart, and while a few too-easy rhymes and vocal melodies come off as less than fresh, in total it’s a powerful batch of songs and a seriously fun listen.
Last semester, I succeeded far more than I ever had before in combating first-year composition students’ reliance on “bias” as a framework for judging sources, and in the process we had richer conversations about media and sources of information than I’d experienced in any FYC class.
All of this has changed my idea of grief as a private thing. It’s private in the sense that it’s internal, but it’s not at all private – it’s public, in fact – in the sense that what I’m feeling has everything to do with my connections to others.
They taught me that having something to say and having your shit together are deeply intertwined. That if you want to be listened to you’d better give people a reason to listen, and that you can - should - expect that from other people.
This is Bill Moyers interviewing one of the authors of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals Assess a President, which will be published in October. An unprecedented event like this shows what a mess we’re in. The basic thesis is that Trump’s mental instabilities and disconnection from reality make him so dangerous that we must remove him from office immediately. But reading this interview I can’t help thinking that DT succeeds because of the traits these experts write about.
Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital looks for the roots of global warming in 18th and 19th century UK cotton mills, where coal power first took hold on a mass scale, and the book asks if our fossil-fuel driven quagmire was inevitable or avoidable. He argues that it was avoidable.
One of our many challenges in the coming years is to not be exhausted by this exhausting prismatic reality. We have to learn to ridicule alternative facts while taking them seriously.
I'm teaching two classes this semester, Environmental Literature and Rhetoric, and Writing Social Justice, a required course at Roosevelt U. In WSJ students had read two chapters from Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice about "democracy as public reason." Here are our discussion questions, which took us most of the way through our 75 minute class meeting...
It would be accurate to say that Thomas’s decision lacks humanity, in the sense that there are no humans present in his reasoning. And this makes sense, because it turns out that removing humans from the semi-auto/bump-stock/auto equation is the way to make his argument work logically.