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The art of transcending reason

By Ben Van Heuvelen

Recent editions of this publication have seen the craft of opinion writing advanced and refined to an unprecedented degree. Potentially explosive debate has found lucid and poignant expression; constructive dialogue has risen from issues that, in a less enlightened arena, might have spawned haughty and dogmatic ranting. A few pieces have even surpassed traditional boundaries of linguistic expression to define, in this writer’s view, a new rhetorical genre.

Seminal figures in this movement, most notably CJ MacDonald, Ben Abelson, and Bob Kao, have advanced the art of opinion writing by systematically abandoning the argumentatively effective features of their craft: They have, through the absence of those features, been able to critique their own craft while in the process advancing their specific positions.

In his Queerleaders were childish, selfish, and embarrassing, CJ MacDonald, a prominent albeit recent revolutionary voice, deconstructs the half-time display at the homecoming football game in groundbreaking fashion. Whereas a conventional debater might have striven to reach his or her conclusions logically through mutually agreed-upon premises, MacDonald instead assumes a “childish” voice of his own and seems to “embarrass” himself: “Nobody cares! Shut the fuck up. Keep it to yourself,” he writes.

By embarrassing himself through the use of precisely the same argumentative method as that of his dialectical adversaries (in this case, a “childish display”), he implicitly demonstrates the absurdity of his opponents’ position. Because his piece then becomes successful and gains effectiveness as persuasion, it also – through its defying of convention – comments on the convention itself. What constitutes persuasive writing? Is an argumentative structure really necessary?

Yuji Fujii continues this subtle critique of rhetorical structure in his recent piece, Kao blinded by finger-pointing. In a calculated display of name-calling (“you are nothing more than a naïve, bitter weasel who can’t seem to remove his own head from his fat ass”) and nonsense-writing (“As a result [of living in a PC world], we have forgotten what we’re truly striving to endeavor”), he presents strategies of persuasion whose lack of potency rivals “finger-pointing.” The ineffectiveness of his argument becomes an indictment of his opponent’s. His piece is at once both argumentation and demonstration, a master-work in which form follows and explicates function.

For all of his skill, however, Fujii has clearly drawn much from his interlocutor, Bob Kao. In Hi-Rise altercation: Racially motivated hate-crime?, Kao employs a similar rhetorical strategy, this time to a topic of acute sensitivity. Of a recent fight between students of different races, Kao observes that “as a member of multiple oppressed groups, I know this incident was racial. If you know anything about power and oppression, you know this incident was racial.”

In a profitable gambit, Kao neglects to apply intellectual rigor to an emotionally explosive issue. As a result, his reader comes to appreciate the gravity of the topic through the very act of bemoaning the potential consequences of its specious treatment. Moreover, Kao’s rash and uninformed characterization of an inter-racial fight as necessarily racially motivated also mirrors the process of stereotyping through which racism arises.

The impotence of his writing serves both to underscore the flaccidity of racism and to call into question the necessity of rigid standards in rhetorical construction. If a disregard of logical structure and constructive tone can prove so efficacious, then how can any modern writer continue to employ such dated conventions?

Implicit in the jumbled prose of these wordsmiths lies the astounding conclusion that logic no longer needs to service our thought. These authors seem to be merely the first to realize that reason only constricts human contemplation. We all share a responsibility to treat important issues with constructive and thoughtful discourse. Let’s all commit to a higher standard in the Wespeak pages of the Argus.

Van Heuvelen is a member of the class of 2002